Yet another City of Austin ECAD compliance season is upon us. Austin Energy is intending to send out a letter early April to all commercial building owners informing them of the ECAD Ordinance and the June 1st deadline. IF you have already contracted Blue Ocean to ensure compliance, please disregard these letters. If you haven’t yet made arrangements for ECAD compliance, Blue Ocean can help you comply. As our agreement states, we guarantee your ECAD compliance!
ENERGY STAR Rating Changes
As you may or may not know, ENERGY STAR Ratings are based on the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), which is only updated periodically. The next update will be implemented in August of this year. As more new buildings are being developed with ENERGY STAR and LEED standards it is not a surprise that the office building stock is becoming more energy efficient. The implication of this is that most buildings will see a decrease in their ENERGY STAR rating of 10-12 points after August of this year.
We recommend completing the ENERGY STAR Certification (if eligible) for 2018 well before this change.
Please feel free to contact us should you have any questions regarding ECAD Compliance and/or ENERGY STAR certification.
Blue Ocean Energy and BOMA Austin are working together to help improve the commercial ECAD compliance process. Earlier this month a notice went out from Austin Energy to all commercial office properties advising “it’s not too late” to comply with the ECAD June 1 reporting requirement. The problem was, many of the recipients of the notice were already in compliance. Blue Ocean’s Bo Petersen brought the issue to the attention of the BOMA Austin Sustainability Committee who raised the issue with the Austin Energy Major Accounts team.
The result was Austin Energy decided to implement a couple of changes based on the BOMA Austin and Blue Ocean Energy information. Austin Energy immediately provided a copy of the Portfolio Manager data to the Customer Information Group to ensure they could see the Portfolio Manager submissions. Next, they initiated a plan to send a letter to all customers who have complied using Portfolio Manager. This letter is a “thank you” for their Portfolio Manager submission which means Austin Energy will notify them that the submission was received.
To read the post on the BOMA Austin website click here.
In the past week, Austin Energy has been sending out letters to building owners/managers about properties not being in compliance with the ECAD Ordinance. Unfortunately, many Austin Energy customers are receiving this type of letter in error due to the changes in Portfolio Manager (PM) which is the tool utilized for ECAD compliance. The options on how to report via PM changed last year and this is causing issues for Austin Energy’s software.
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