March 13, 2009— TIAA-CREF, one of America’s largest institutional real estate investors, announced that it has lowered the energy intensity of its real estate portfolio by 3.6 percent since the organization announced its goal to improve the energy efficiency of its real estate portfolio in 2008.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has named TIAA-CREF a 2009 ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year for outstanding energy management and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, citing the company’s progress in improving energy efficiency. This marks the second consecutive year that TIAA-CREF has been honored with this distinction.
TIAA-CREF’s Global Real Estate embarked on an energy benchmarking initiative in 2007 across the 43 million square feet of office buildings and other properties within the company’s real estate portfolio, with the goal of identifying opportunities to reduce energy consumption by 10 percent by 2010. Since that time, the energy saved is equivalent to about 32 million kilowatt hours (kWh) and 22,520 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions prevented.
Energy efficiency improvements were achieved through TIAA-CREF’s work with over 25 third-party property management companies charged with the day-to-day operations of its real estate assets to identify portfolio-wide and property-specific opportunities for improvement. Some examples of portfolio-wide strategies for improving energy performance that are being implemented include operating buildings on Saturdays only at the tenant’s request and verifying that lights are turned off when the offices are unoccupied.
In addition, specific properties are realizing savings by implementing energy management action plans. For more information, see the Web site.
