After a 20-plus-year career at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that included heading the Energy Star Portfolio Manager program, Mike Zatz took the Trump administration’s buyout offer earlier this year. Now he’s bringing his insight from the public building performance benchmarking platform to the private sector as senior vice president of global data ecosystem and partnerships for ESG reporting software company Measurabl, where he hopes to make its own benchmarking platform widely available outside North America.  

“We’re really going to look everywhere for very new markets,” including Asia, North America and Europe, Zatz said in an interview. “There are some big opportunities in the Middle East too, where you have a massive number of buildings.”

When he left EPA, building operations professionals were assessing news reports of the Trump administration cutting funds for Portfolio Manager and other Energy Star programs, but for now the platform remains in place.   

“Energy Star is still there,” Zatz said. “I'm not, but it's still there, and I hope it will continue for a long time.”

One of the keys to Portfolio Manager’s success over the years, with building operators and state and local jurisdictions across the United States using it as their benchmarking platform, is its availability to everyone without charge.  

“It allowed people to use it to try things out,” Zatz said. “We were pushing a new concept of benchmarking your energy use. The fact it was free is what allowed it to be adopted by other programs. Jurisdictions that wanted to put regulations in place to require buildings to report, they wanted to get those passed [and] they need as few barriers as possible.”

At Measurabl, Zatz is hoping to bring some of the core principles that made Portfolio Manager an industry standard-setter – it’s free and it’s trusted – to new horizons. 

We wanted “to take everything good about Portfolio Manager and why it really worked as the center of an ecosystem, and try to replicate that globally,” Zatz said.

The company recently launched its Free Sustainability Software Solution, a tool that has been in the works for over a year – even before turbulence concerning the Energy Star program arose in the federal government, Zatz said. Within weeks of its launch, subscribers onboarded more than 12,000 buildings representing 2.2 billion square feet across 40 countries, which will be offered at no cost, in perpetuity, the company said. 

The tool, which includes Energy Star Portfolio Manager integration, “removes the barrier to entry for everybody, which is absolutely critical to something like this working,” Zatz said. “Certainly, if people want more sophisticated things, those exist. But if you don’t want those, that’s completely fine. You can come in and use the [Measurabl] tool and leverage it.”

To make its platform trusted in the same way as Portfolio Manager, the company is working to make data more accessible and give users input on how it’s structured. We want “stakeholders to come in and have a say in how things run in terms of governance and what we do with this global ecosystem that we’re putting together,” he said.  

Although the details are still under development, Zatz, now just over a week in his new role, is working to engage with as many stakeholders as possible.

“We view everybody as partners in this, and partner is a very important word,” he said. “Not clients. And that’s the only way it’s going to work. If everybody has a seat at the table, I think that’s going to help to build that trust.” 

Zatz said he and the company hope to build an ecosystem that works for those who use it. Throughout his time at Energy Star, he said, the guiding light was providing customers, mainly building owners and managers, features that were valuable to them. 

“I'm not a fan of the speculative,” he said. “I'd much rather talk to stakeholders and find out what it is they really need, and if that's something I can deliver to them within the parameters of my program and my resources, then that's what I'm going to focus on even if it deviates a little bit from where I want them to go. Because in the end, I need them to do something.” 

“The goal is to reduce energy use, which has other co-benefits along with it reducing pollution and saving money. [But] we weren’t the ones that could save the energy. We need the building owners and managers to do things, and so we need them in the tent,” he said. “The way to get them in the tent and keep them in the tent is to give them things that they need,” he said. 

Europe is a key part of Measurabl’s expansion plans. It already has some partnerships in place and customers growing in the region, he said. The company also has its sights set on Asia, which is “very fledgling,” with both less developed countries and big real estate owners, he said. And the Middle East is on its radar, too. 

Despite industry concerns over Portfolio Manager going away, Zatz said the program’s future looks bright, given the outpouring of support from industry leaders. But private efforts, like what Measurabl is offering, can step in with an alternative.

“If Portfolio Manager, God forbid, did go away, then I think obviously we’d be in a position to try to step in and help fill that void,” he said. But for right now, it ain’t broke, so we shouldn’t fix it. We should just continue to leverage it,” Zatz said.