EDF Climate Corps fellow | January 11, 2013
By: Jaxon Love
Shorenstein Properties is a real estate company that manages more than 25 million square feet of commercial building space across the United States. As the Sustainability Program Manager here at Shorenstein (and an EDF Climate Corps alum), efficient energy use across this portfolio remains top of mind for me.
The company has taken on an impressive list of energy efficiency initiatives to date, and we recently decided to take inventory of these projects to see how they panned out.
But there was a problem: Though utility-scale energy efficiency program evaluation, measurement and verification (EM&V) methodology is well established, this type of performance evaluation for corporate energy efficiency programs is relatively uncharted territory. So we adapted utility EM&V methodology for a corporate program application.
We then performed an “energy savings tour,” a scan of energy projects across all of our buildings. The findings were impressive: A 5.1 percent energy reduction portfolio-wide, which saved $1.7 million and 12.3 million kilowatt hours annually. Payback on investments was six months.
EDF and Shorenstein recently published a case study titled "EDF Confirms Big Savings from Shorenstein’s Corporate Energy Efficiency Program."
The story has sparked quite a bit of interest across the energy efficiency space. ClimateWire published an article last March about the success of our unique project at Shorenstein. And it eventually caught the attention of the Garrison Institute, which invited me to attend the 2012 Climate, Buildings and Behavior Symposium in Garrison, New York.
I was honored to speak on behalf of Shorenstein and EDF to a diverse group of real estate professionals to share knowledge on the design of energy consumption behavior-change programs for building occupants. I now look forward to sharing my learnings from this project with you on an upcoming webinar, presented by EDF and EnerNOC, titled Getting to the Bottom Line of Energy Efficiency Investments. Tune in Wednesday January 23 from 1 pm – 2pm ET to learn more. REGISTER HERE.
Jaxon Love is the Sustainability Program Manager at Shorenstein Properties LLC and is responsible for running Shorenstein’s comprehensive in-house sustainability program, which includes the company’s corporate operations as well as all properties under management. Prior to joining Shorenstein, Mr. Love was a fellow of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps program. Prior to that he held positions at Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and EcoNorthwest, an economic consultancy. He holds an M.B.A. in Sustainable Business and a Masters in Accounting from the University of Oregon. Mr. Love is a member of BOMA San Francisco’s Energy and Environment Committee and the U.S. Green Building Council’s Northern California chapter.