In a report this week from its Council on Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (CFIRE), the National Institute of Building Sciences issued the findings and recommendations on the financing of small commercial retrofit projects for energy efficiency.
Small commercial buildings (generally defined as less than 50,000 sf) make up the majority of the nation’s building stock by both number and area (93.9% and 49.5%, respectively). Yet, despite this vast segment of the building stock, investments in energy-efficiency retrofit projects for small commercial buildings have lagged behind those for larger buildings.
The CFIRE report, Financing Small Commercial Building Energy Performance Upgrades: Challenges and Opportunities, identifies several barriers to investment in such retrofits. Key issues include the costs and complexity associated with relatively small loan sizes, as well as the challenge owners have in understanding and trusting predicted retrofit outcomes.
Conservatively estimated as a $35.6 billion market, investments in small building retrofits could yield the nation an estimated 424,000 job years of full-time employment and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 87 million metric tons a year. Small building retrofits would also improve the resilience of the nation’s built environment and take pressure off the aging electric grid.
In addition to identifying the challenges, the report also highlights current programs and mechanisms that can be replicated or expanded to address the challenges.
The report recommends:
• Federal programs should be expanded and deployed to facilitate state and local energy retrofit financing efforts.
• Federal policy should encourage the development and testing of energy retrofit programs at the individual city, county or utility level.
• Public-private energy retrofit approaches should be encouraged in federal policy making.
• Federal, state and community policy makers should recognize local and property-level variations in designing energy efficiency programs that serve small businesses and others.
• Policy makers should leverage national Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) data, as well as the growing quantity of voluntary and mandatory benchmarking and disclosure programs, to create more meaningful building performance databases.
• Utilities should be required to provide energy consumption data to property owners and tenants, including aggregate building level data for properties in which tenants are separately metered.
• Public policies and programs should be designed to anticipate the future aggregation of energy retrofit loans into bonds, and to provide the basis for appropriate loan documentation.
CFIRE released the report during its Annual Meeting, held during Building Innovation 2015: The National Institute of Building Sciences Annual Conference and Expo.
Related Stories
Smart Buildings | Jul 27, 2015
Perkins+Will imagines new opportunity for Atlantic City
The architecture giant believes it has a solution that could put Atlantic City’s existing infrastructure to good use—by turning the Jersey Shore city into a research center for climate change and coastal resiliency.
Green | Jul 27, 2015
MUST SEE: Dutch company to test using plastic waste for road construction
KWS Infra is piloting a program to make roads from plastic garbage, including bags and bottles extracted from the ocean.
Smart Buildings | Jul 12, 2015
Office of Management and Budget asks agencies to consider climate change when budgeting for construction projects
For the first time, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget is asking agencies to submit budget plans that consider the effects of climate change on construction and maintenance of federal facilities.
Smart Buildings | Jul 9, 2015
St. Petersburg Pier’s dramatic makeover gets green light from city officials
The Pier Park will be a platform for a multitude of smaller and more flexible programs and experiences for tourists and the local community.
BIM and Information Technology | Jul 1, 2015
World’s first fully 3D-printed office to be produced in Dubai
A 20-foot-tall printer will be needed for the project, spewing out construction material consisting of special reinforced concrete, fiber reinforced plastic, and glass fiber reinforced gypsum.
Smart Buildings | Jun 28, 2015
Why does an American city of 400,000 feel more compact than a European city of 2.4 million?
HDR’s Jim Thomson brings home some insights from a recent trip to Paris.
BIM and Information Technology | Jun 23, 2015
A steel bridge in Amsterdam will be 3D printed
To complete the bridge, multi-axis industrial robots will be fitted with 3D printing tools and controlled using custom software that enables the robots to print metals, plastics, and combinations of materials.
Smart Buildings | Jun 16, 2015
Former Studebaker plant to become mixed-use tech hub in South Bend, Ind.
Once the nation’s fourth largest automobile manufacturer, employing as many as 23,000 people in South Bend, the Studebaker campus closed in 1963.
Smart Buildings | Jun 15, 2015
NIST releases guide for community resilience planning
The guide lays out a six-step process that starts with the formation of a resilience team drawn from the community and culminates with the development and implementation of resilience strategies that are updated regularly.
BIM and Information Technology | Jun 14, 2015
Deep data: How greater intelligence can lead to better buildings
The buzzword may be “Big Data,” but the reality is that Building Teams need to burrow deep into those huge datasets in the course of designing and building new facilities. Much of the information is free. You just need to dig for it.
