AB 802…if this is your first time hearing of it, time to catch up and act fast.
According to the California Energy Commission, all buildings larger than 50,000 square feet in California will now be responsible for reporting energy data every year starting June 1, 2018. Yes, you read that right. With about a month left until the disclosure deadline, it’s time to take action to avoid late penalties.
Learn more on AB 802 Webinar with the California Energy Commission
What is AB 802?
Assembly Bill 802 requires a statewide building energy use benchmarking and disclosure program, following a trend of other municipalities moving towards mandated building performance disclosure. This program requires all buildings greater than 50,000 square feet to report whole building energy use annually. This is the first year that buildings must benchmark and disclose data to the CEC through ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager.
How does AB 802 affect me?
If you’re a building owner or operator with a large, non-residential building in California, you need to act fast and report your energy data this year. Next year, even multifamily buildings with more than 17 residential utility accounts will also be required to benchmark.
Note: If you’re a Measurabl user, the buildings affected can be identified and exported under the “Ordinances” tab.
Good news! Utility companies in California are required to provide whole-building energy use data to owners and operators upon request in order to comply with this ordinance. That means you’ll have access to your building data even if your leasing structure does not allow you to see tenant consumption data. For GRESB reporters, this will increase your data coverage for 2017 and will (hopefully) increase your GRESB Score this year.
What do I need to do now?
If you do not currently have a centralized place to keep your energy data, start collecting that information now. You needed it yesterday. Utility companies will usually keep about 2 years of data. If you don’t have access to the database, you will need to manually input data from your utility bills into ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager. We won’t mislead you… this will take hours to manually gather this data, so plan appropriately.
For those who do have a central ESG data repository system, your workload will be much lighter.
If you’re a Measurabl user, take advantage of the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager integration to verify the accuracy of data, and use the Utility Sync feature to automatically pull historical data from utility accounts. You may also track the progress of each ordinance filing in Measurabl’s software.
Still confused about AB 802? Watch our recorded webinar with the California Energy Commission to learn what you need to know to file your benchmarking report in time. Catch up!