Frequently Asked Questions

City-owned properties and large commercial properties (20k sq. ft. +) will be the first properties required to benchmark. Smaller commercial properties and multi-family properties will be phased over time.

This table shows the exact square footage of properties required to benchmark and by when:

No, none of these residential buildings are required to benchmark under Ordinance No. 05. 

Building owners required to benchmark under the Building IQ program need to input their property information and annual utility bill data into the EPA's ENERGY STAR®  Portfolio Manager tool and share the information with the City of Aspen. The City's partner, the Community Office for Resource Efficiency (CORE), is available to help with this entire benchmarking process. Get started today by clicking here. 

Owners of commercial properties 20,000 square feet and larger are required to get a building assessment, which looks at building performance and energy and water usage, and can be done for free through our partners at CORE. To schedule an assessment, click here.

For all help with benchmarking, contact CORE.

See table below for the list of properties 20,000 square feet or larger. The properties on this list have to benchmark and share the report with the City of Aspen by December 1, 2022.

There is no charge to building owners or to the City of Aspen to use the ENERGY STAR®  Portfolio Manager platform to benchmark. 

Click here to schedule a free commercial energy assessment and portfolio consultation with the City's partner, the Community Office for Resource Efficiency (CORE).

By providing information about a building’s energy use and comparing its performance to similar buildings, benchmarking empowers building owners, managers, and other stakeholders to make more informed decisions, identify opportunities to improve energy and water use in their buildings, and save money. Evidence of these benefits is already available: by analyzing data from over 35,000 buildings that used the free EPA tool, ENERGY STAR®  Portfolio Manager and received an ENERGY STAR® score from 2008 to 2011, US EPA found that average energy use declined by 7%. For more benchmarking trends, visit US EPA’s DataTrends Series, found at www.EnergyStar.gov/DataTrends.  

ENERGY STAR®  Portfolio Manager is a free online tool developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) that allows you to track and assess energy and water use across your entire portfolio of buildings in a secure online environment. With Portfolio Manager, you can calculate the building's energy performance, compare it with similar buildings and monitor it over time. When you benchmark a building in Portfolio Manager, one of the key metrics you'll see is energy use intensity, or EUI.

The EUI expresses a building’s energy use as a function of its size or other characteristics. For most property types in Portfolio Manager, the EUI is expressed as energy per square foot per year. It’s calculated by dividing the total energy consumed by the building in one year by square footage. For many building types, Portfolio Manager calculates the ENERGY STAR® rating, which indicates how efficiently buildings use energy on a 1-100 scale, where a score of 50 indicates average energy performance. Buildings with a score of 75 or better are top performers and may be eligible for the ENERGY STAR® certification. Some building types are currently not eligible to receive an ENERGY STAR® score, but can still benefit from benchmarking, as Portfolio Manager calculates other energy performance metrics such as EUI. 

No, per Ordinance No. 05 - Building IQ, property owners must use ENERGY STAR®  Portfolio Manager to benchmark and report their covered buildings to the City of Aspen. Like many other jurisdictions across the nation, Aspen is using the reporting functionality of Portfolio Manager to ensure compliance with Building IQ.  

Email Climate@aspen.gov and we are happy to help answer your questions.  

If a covered property changes ownership, at the time of transfer, the former owner shall furnish to the new owner an electronic copy of the record representing the covered property within the benchmarking tool, utility customer consent documentation, (if any), the request to a qualified utility for aggregated data (if any), and any other information about the property that is necessary for benchmarking the covered property.  

A UBID is a unique way to identify a property, building, or campus of buildings that is more specific than an address, parcel number, or building name. The City of Aspen is using UBIDs to attribute a unique identifier (separate from address or parcel numbers, which can be confusing) to properties under the Building IQ ordinance to ensure utmost clarity in property identification. Each property under the Building IQ ordinance will have a UBID, which the property owner will add to the property’s Portfolio Manager account. 

Do you have questions about how to enter your UBID in Portfolio Manager? Click here for instructions, or get in touch with CORE.