Description:
The first step to improving your municipality’s energy usage is understanding your existing impact. Only after knowing your baseline usage can you attempt to set meaningful, achievable goals for scaling down your use of electricity, gas, coal, etc. By tracking performance over time, municipal officials can better prioritize potential sustainability actions, like retrofits or replacements, based on the cost versus impact of each.
The EPA’s free-to-use Energy STAR Portfolio Manager tool allows municipalities to upload building energy consumption data to benchmark and compare over time the relative efficiency of municipally managed buildings. By uploading energy, water, and waste/materials data for each building, you can prioritize efficiency investments that will have the greatest emissions and/or monetary impact for the municipality.