Many FMs participate in benchmarking programs to see where they stand in comparison to their peers. But there is a growing awareness that buildings contribute significant carbon emissions and general scientific agreement that carbon emissions are contributing to global warming. You can apply benchmarking to see how your building compares with others in its peer group, in carbon emissions. Once you complete the comparisons, you can then see which best practices the others in your peer group who are outperforming your building have implemented, so you can determine what else you can do to reduce your building’s carbon footprint.
We will use FM BENCHMARKING to illustrate how this can be done. Utility consumption quantities such as natural gas and diesel fuel are needed to show energy benchmarks. Producing a carbon footprint requires that we calculate the carbon emissions from these various energy sources. Most energy sources emit relatively constant amounts of carbon per unit of consumption except for electricity. Carbon emissions from electricity are highly variable depending on the fuel mix of the serving utility. The United States average is 1.345 lbs of carbon per kwh but even in the US some utilities produce half that.
Benchmarking participants can accept the default value for carbon emissions from electricity or input a value based on information provided from their serving utility.
Let’s analyze our facility to see how we compare in our Scope 1 carbon emissions. Scope 1 includes any carbon emissions resulting from burning of fuel on site.
We can see that our carbon emissions are near the median but in the third performance quartile.
Let’s look at our Scope II results; Scope 2 includes off-site carbon emissions such as electricity.
In this example our performance is in the second quartile at about 41 pounds of carbon per SF.
The next question many Facility Managers will ask is what can be done to reduce their carbon footprint. The majority of the Scope II carbon emissions can be attributed to electricity usage so many of the concepts and best practices can be utilized. For this analysis we utilize consumption values rather than costs to make comparisons.
The example above shows the best practices for energy conservation strategies. Percentages of implementation for your quartile and the next better performing quartile are shown making it easy to see which best practices should be considered. Simply look for which best practices you are not implementing in your building (the “no” responses in the third column from the right). Then see which of those best practices the others in your filter set who are in your performance quartile (2nd) and the next better one (1st) have implemented by looking at those who have the highest percentages of “yes” responses. For example, on the third line, motion sensors in restrooms/washrooms, which we have not implemented in our building, 76% of those in our performance quartile have implement that best practice, and 89% of those in the top quartile have done so—this, therefore, would be a logical best practice for us to consider if our goal is to reduce our building’s carbon footprint.
