Besides the creation of various active and pending legislation (such as dry-sounding California AB1103 that requires energy benchmarking data released during property transactions) and the ongoing development of national standards (such as ASTM’s Building Energy Performance Assessment, or the chipper-sounding BEPA), we’ve found that more and more of our clients have become interested in assessing a property’s energy consumption and identifying potential energy savings as a standard part of due diligence. But no one seems to be able to quite agree on what the service should include, how much the data is worth and how much to charge.
This summer we’ve started working with Portland Energy Conservation Inc. (PECI) developing methodologies for building operations surveys and energy audits. PECI – http://www.peci.org/ – is a non-profit group that has focused on energy efficiency issues since 1981. Recently they received a grant from the California Energy Commission to conduct a pilot program developing energy assessment procedures to be performed in conjunction with a standard Property Condition Assessment.
It’s an exciting time since everyone seems to be in on the act and many groups are trying to stake their claim. It will be fun to see what procedures and standards will become the norm and which will fall by the wayside; which services clients are willing to pay good money for and which services lenders just want as a free add-on to a PCA; and which acronyms we’re all using a few years from now in our acronym-saturated industry.
