Building IQ

Building IQ header includes three building shapes

The City of Aspen is committed to reducing its overall greenhouse gas emissions by 63% by 2030 and 100% (zero carbon) by 2050. Since buildings account for 58% of Aspen's total greenhouse gas emission with 25% coming from commercial structures, we are doubling down on our efforts to reduce our carbon “blueprint”.

Know Your Building. Know Your Power.58% of greenhouse gas emissions in Aspen come from buildings

The City of Aspen is committed to reducing its overall greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. Since buildings account for 58% of Aspen's total greenhouse gas emission with 25% coming from commercial structures, we are doubling down on our efforts to reduce our carbon “blueprint”.

Building IQ is a City of Aspen program that helps commercial and multi-family buildings save energy in a community-wide effort to keep our city, and our planet, healthy and thriving. Through Building IQ, Aspen is joining thousands of cities worldwide that are working on innovative policies to reduce building energy use through benchmarking and building performance standards policies.

Benefits of Building IQ

Through the Building IQ program, building owners can expect to: 

  • Conserve energy
  • Help manage your building
  • Identify short- and long-term savings
  • Support global climate action
  • Market as a green building
  • Inform City of Aspen energy programs

BenchmarkingLaptop showing graphs

The first step to saving energy in buildings is to benchmark — that is, to measure and compare a building’s energy to similar buildings, past consumption, or a reference performance level. The simple act of benchmarking can decrease energy use by 2 - 3% per year, a modest but meaningful reduction.

Start Benchmarking

Benchmarking your building is actually straightforward and simple. Watch these tutorials to learn how to set up an Energy Star Portfolio Manager account, input data, and more.

Click here for a video about how to create an account in Energy Star Portfolio Manager
Click here for a video about how to add a property in Energy Star Portfolio Manager
Click here for a video about how to create energy meters and manually add data to Portfolio Manager
Click here for a video about how to check for and correct data errors in Portfolio Manager
Click here for a video about how to submit your Portfolio Manager report to the City of Aspen
 

The City and our partners are available to help you get started and sustain your benchmarking goals. Get started today! 

Want help understanding your building’s energy and water use? Start with a building assessment through CORE.

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Building Performance Standards 

The second step in the Building IQ program is called Building Performance Standards (BPS). A BPS is a policy that requires building owners to meet performance targets for energy use by actively improving their buildings over time. Requiring reductions from existing buildings helps achieve decarbonization goals because the majority of commercial and residential building stock that will be standing in 2050 is already built. From a building owner's perspective, BPS provides flexibility as owners can use whatever technologies and operational strategies they decide are most effective and economical to meet the target. Multiple state and local governments have passed BPS policies, including Washington D.C., New York City, St. Louis, and Colorado and Washington states. 

The BPS policy details for the City of Aspen have not been defined, yet. We are interested in getting feedback from community stakeholders and will be starting stakeholder engagement beginning in 2022 with the goal of collecting input to implement policies the following year, in 2023. Technical and financial resources will be available to help aid in the process.

Informational Attachment

Download the Building IQ informational attachment to access additional benchmarking and building performance standards resources. 

Contact


Tessa Schreiner
Sustainability Programs Administrator
Email | 970-920-5104