Landlords Take a Harder Look at Tenant Energy Consumption

Tenant consumptions make up 60-70% of the total utility expenses, according to Enertiv.

In the past, owners have been reluctant to press tenants to help reduce these expenses. With the rise of ESG, though, owners may have to take a harder look at reducing consumption.

In a new post on its website, Enertiv says GRESB and other ESG frameworks are becoming more granular and performance indicators, including energy, water, GHG emissions, and waste, need to be reported in both landlord and tenant-controlled spaces.

Tenants can be nudged into new behavior with the right set of tools, Enertiv maintains. 

There are ways to utilize modern submetering done with a mobile app to calculate tariffs and generate bills. There are even ways to use digital, remotely-readable submeters to remove the meter reading step entirely. These tools can produce customizations that provide tenants with comparisons, such as the equivalent number of trees consumed, which are more tangible than kilowatt hours. They can also provide benchmarking to let tenants see where they rank in the building.

These systems can support tenants interested in becoming ENERGY STAR Recognized. Future scenarios include landlords providing their tenants with specific recommendations on how to decrease energy consumption. Machine learning algorithms can identify specific actions to take, and analytics can show that changes are being made.

Some of this is already in play. One example is PG&E’s commercial whole building program, which financially rewards customers for every unit of energy saved.

Gridium’s energy efficiency retrofit project in San Francisco on behalf of Downtown Properties was the first to leverage that PG&E program. It is expected to improve building operations, exceed project costs with energy savings in five years and reduce annual energy costs by $0.26 per square foot or 15% of total energy costs.

“Our new program measures efficiency savings with innovative normalized metered energy consumption methods, leveraging the advanced technology used by SmartMeters,” said Aaron August, vice president of business development and customer engagement for PG&E, in December. “This first project shows that measuring energy at the meter is the next crucial step towards unlocking deeper energy efficiency. We can now incentivize project-based savings we see at the meter, while helping ensure the savings persist and that everyone’s economic objectives are met.”