Commercial Building Owners Want To Save Energy Star – CleanTechnica

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Lee Zeldin, the MAGA apparatchik in charge of the EPA today, wants to eliminate the Energy Star program. In May, he told members of Congress that the program could be outsourced to private contractors. “I have actually had multiple entities reach out to EPA over the course of the last few weeks because they want to take over Energy Star, which is a program that requires a big staff, a big taxpayer funded staff, and a whole lot of tax dollars,” he said.

This is the sort of blather MAGAlomanics are known for. The government can’t do anything right. All government workers are lazy, shiftless clock watchers who fritter away the day drinking lattes until its time to go home. Everything the government does is a waste of money and benefits no one. Actually, the government tried letting private companies manage their own oversight when the FAA decided Boeing knew best when it came to manufacturing airplanes — until those airplanes started falling out of the sky, killing everyone on board.

The fact that the Energy Star program costs money is a misdirection play because the benefits the public derives from the program far outweigh the costs. In May, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, told Grist, “Energy Star has saved American families and businesses more than half a trillion dollars in energy costs, By eliminating this program, [the president] will force Americans to buy appliances that cost more to run and waste more energy.” In addition to the energy savings, it is estimated those more efficient appliances have prevented more than 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide from being dumped into the atmosphere over the past 30 years.

Energy Star Has Other Advantages

Now it seems the Energy Star program has another benefit, one that many are not aware of. According to Bloomberg, more than 330,000 buildings across the country — about 25% of all commercial building in the US — use Portfolio Manager, a software tool within the Energy Star program. It allows owners to tally energy consumption across properties and spot inefficient buildings in need of upgrades. In the last year, Portfolio Manager helped businesses and organizations avoid $14 billion in energy costs.

Let’s see. A few million to run the Energy Star program versus a savings of $14 billion. Is that a compelling cost/benefit ratio? It is if you have half a brain, but not if your gray matter has been infected with the MAGA “government can’t do anything right” virus. “This is a business case for us,” Duane Desiderio of the Real Estate Roundtable, a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy group for the real estate industry told Bloomberg. “It allows us to monetize how much energy we are saving. It translates to dollars.”

Heating, cooling, and lighting buildings are responsible for more than a quarter of global emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. In New York City, they are by far the largest source of emissions. According to the New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, “over two thirds of emissions come from buildings. Almost half of these are attributed to only 2% of buildings.”

Portfolio Manager became part of the Energy Star program in 2000. It allows businesses to track, measure, and compare energy efficiency across hundreds of thousands of buildings all over the county. In addition to helping them make decisions on where to invest on energy-saving upgrades, owners can use it to generate reports and to ensure they are complying with local mandates for energy use disclosure.

While a preliminary version of the 2026 federal budget proposal in May did not suggest eliminating the Energy Star program and Portfolio Manager directly, it suggested eliminating funding for the EPA’s Office of Atmospheric Protection, which is responsible for Energy Star.

Data You Can Trust

Advocates like the Real Estate Round Table value Portfolio Manager because it is free, public, and used throughout the building management industry. “It’s really important to have a single source of truth that is trusted, third-party, government-backed,” Alex Dews, CEO of the Institute for Market Transformation, a nonprofit that promotes energy efficient buildings told Bloomberg. Because it’s objective and science based, “no one has ever perceived it as biased,” added Dana Schneider, director of energy and sustainability at Empire State Realty Trust.

Compliance with state and local policies regarding building energy use is an important element of the Portfolio Manager program. Building Performance Colorado, a state energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction program, requires most buildings that are 50,000 square feet or larger to benchmark energy use and comply with building performance standards. Portfolio Manager allows those businesses “to easily track energy use and identify opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce costs,” said Ari Rosenblum of the Colorado Energy Office.

Privatizing Portfolio Manager would not only increase costs for building owners, it would also have a negative effect on the integrity of the data. Multiple businesses could create their own versions of the software, fragmenting the data, experts say. State and local governments would struggle to enforce energy efficiency policies if buildings reported data from different sources, they added. “You are able to compare yourself to so many other buildings because everybody uses Energy Star,” Robbins Schneider of Empire State Realty Trust said. “If the tool disappeared, it would be catastrophic for the industry.”

Political Shenanigans

Trashing Energy Star and Portfolio Manager fits right in with the objectives of the failed administration, which would be happy to see more energy wasted so fossil fuel companies could sell more of their climate killing products.

Earlier this year, CleanTechnica contributor Joe Wachunas wrote that eliminating the Energy Star program would be a great loss of America. He pointed out it costs about 25 cents a year per US citizen — an infinitesimal amount when compared to the benefits in provides. Just the purchase of one Energy Star rated appliances, such as a refrigerator, saves about $18 in electricity. 25 cents versus $18.00? That’s a cost/benefit ratio of about 600. Who wouldn’t take that deal?

Figures lie and liars figure. Focusing solely on the costs of the Energy Star program while ignoring its benefits presents a deliberately distorted picture to the public. It’s a form of lying, of cooking the books to achieve a political objective that ignores the reality. And yet, the MAGA crowd all bob their heads in unison to indicate they approve of expanding the US defense budget by over $100 billion. There is never any mention of government waste when the dollars are dedicated to national defense.

The Energy Star budget is a rounding errors in the grand scheme of things. But it smacks of “woke” thinking and climate justice, two things that are anathema to the MAGA crowd. Keep in mind that eliminating it is part of the Project 2025 manifesto, written by ideologues propped up by fossil fuel money. That’s all you need to know if you are wondering where this focus on the highly successful Energy Star program is coming from.