Christy Martell is senior vice president at IES, a building performance software company. Opinions are the author’s own.
For the past several years, building performance standards have mainly been a topic for architects, energy modelers and policy advocates. The conversations have happened at design charrettes, in code update meetings and at sustainability conferences. The assumption running through most of those conversations is that if the design community gets it right, the compliance problem takes care of itself.
That assumption is wrong, and many building owners are starting to find that out.
Building performance standards — the new generation of regulations that go beyond prescriptive energy codes to hold buildings accountable for their operational performance — are landing on the desks of facility managers, many of whom were not involved in the original design decisions.
That’s a problem, because in some jurisdictions, the compliance deadlines are arriving, along with the penalties for not meeting them. In many cases, the people now responsible for hitting those targets haven’t been the ones looking into what the targets are.
Addressing that knowledge gap starts with visibility: learning what the building’s performance is, how far it sits from the target and which systems are driving the gap. But it’s not enough just to know these things; you need to know them early enough so you can get the building to the targets.
Compliance landscape
Although a number of jurisdictions have pushed back some or all of their deadlines, compliance requirements are still moving forward. In Boston, for example, the city has pushed back its original reporting deadline from May 15 to August 15. And Denver has pushed back its interim and final target deadlines to 2028 and 2032, respectively. Facility managers will want to familiarize themselves with what their jurisdiction is doing if they’re facing compliance deadlines.
New York City’s Local Law 97, the most aggressive building performance mandate in the country, applies to buildings larger than 25,000 square feet and sets carbon intensity limits that tighten significantly in 2030. The first compliance period began in 2024 and fines are $268 per metric ton of CO2e above the building’s limit.
It’s not just New York where strict standards are being enforced: Washington, D.C.’s Building Energy Performance Standards require applicable buildings to meet the city’s first compliance cycle by the end of 2026; Boston’s Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO) will soon be ramping down its emissions limits; and Denver’s Energize Denver program has imposed performance targets on its largest buildings, subject to the timeline changes.
Chicago, Philadelphia, and a growing list of other cities are also either implementing or developing their own standards. The pattern is consistent: mandates applied first to the largest properties, then stepping down to smaller buildings in subsequent years.
The design-operations gap
Most building performance standards were written with the design community as the primary audience. The framing assumes that compliance is achieved through good design, efficient systems and smart specifications, and that’s partly true. The decisions made at the design stage create either headroom or constraint for the operational team that follows.
But design teams move on. The architect and MEP engineer who optimized the HVAC system for energy performance way back when are not the ones answering for an LL97 fine in 2026. That responsibility belongs to whoever manages the building today, often working with systems they didn’t select, operating under assumptions they weren’t part of making and sometimes running buildings that were never properly commissioned in the first place.
What operations teams need to track
The starting point is energy use intensity. That is the building’s annual energy consumption per square foot, expressed in kBtu/sf, or in carbon terms, depending on the jurisdiction. Most facility managers have access to this data through utility bills and ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, which is the benchmarking platform that most jurisdictions use as their BPS compliance framework.
Portfolio Manager gives the facilities team a headline energy use intensity, or EUI, that tells you how much energy the building is using per square foot. That’s useful as a compliance yardstick, but what it doesn't do is tell you which systems are responsible, whether the pattern is changing and where the corrective lever actually is.
The operations teams making real headway are the ones going a level deeper. Rather than waiting for an annual utility bill summary, they’re pulling consumption data continuously, comparing it against what the building’s systems should be consuming based on how the building is being used — occupancy levels, weather, operating schedules — rather than against a historical average that may reflect a period when the building was running just as inefficiently.
That kind of performance monitoring, tied to the physics of the building rather than just the meter, is what separates a team that can identify and close a gap from one that is watching a compliance number it can’t explain. Platforms built specifically for building performance connect operational data to engineering-grade building models, so when a performance problem surfaces, there's enough context to act on it rather than just observe it.
Beyond the headline figure, the data that enables corrective action is more granular. Which systems are driving consumption? How does performance vary across seasons and occupancy levels? Are there equipment inefficiencies, control failures or operational patterns pushing energy use higher than it should be?
Understanding the shape of a building’s energy consumption — not just the total — is what separates a team that can improve its position from one that is simply watching a number it can’t explain.
For multi-site portfolios, the challenge compounds. Different buildings face different deadlines, different local ordinances and different benchmarks depending on use type. A mixed portfolio spanning multiple jurisdictions needs a clear map of what’s required where and by when, not a generalized sense that compliance is being handled.
The window for early intervention is closing
Buildings facing the nearest deadlines are already in the compliance window. For them, the margin for operational correction — adjusting schedules, optimizing controls, addressing deferred maintenance, improving occupancy management — is real, and shrinking. Capital improvements take time to plan, fund and execute.
For buildings with deadlines a few years further out, the opportunity is better. Getting a clear baseline now, understanding the gap between performance and the applicable target and building a realistic improvement pathway gives operations teams something to work with rather than a deadline to scramble toward.
Building performance standards exist because voluntary action wasn’t moving fast enough. Regulators designed them with teeth. The design community has spent years getting familiar with that reality, and the operations teams that get ahead of it now are the ones treating building energy data as something to actively manage — building the visibility to understand where consumption is really going, and acting while the margin still exists.
