Why Building Owners Don’t Want the EPA to Ditch Energy Star

Lee Zeldin during a hearing in Washington in May. Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg Photo by Kent Nishimura /Bloomberg

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(Bloomberg) — Energy Star — best known for its bright blue-and-white logo — saves homeowners billions of dollars every year in energy costs. But it includes another key feature widely used by commercial real estate to gauge energy use from buildings, a main source of greenhouse gas emissions in cities.

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Property owners and advocates are fretting over its possible demise under the Trump administration.

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Over 330,000 buildings across the country, representing nearly 25% of commercial building space, use Portfolio Manager — a software tool within the federal government’s Energy Star program. It allows owners to tally energy consumption across properties and spot inefficient buildings in need of upgrades. In the last year, Portfolio Manager helped businesses and organizations avoid $14 billion in energy costs.

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“This is a business case for us,” says Duane Desiderio, counsel at The Real Estate Roundtable, a Washington-based nonprofit advocacy group for the real estate industry. “It allows us to monetize how much energy we are saving. It translates to dollars.” 

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The software is currently a free service and Energy Star is a joint program of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, administered by the EPA. But now Republicans are considering axing its funding  and potentially privatizing it as they seek to decrease government spending. 

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Heating, cooling and lighting buildings is responsible for 26% of global emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, and in New York City, buildings are the largest source of emissions by far.

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Portfolio Manager, which has been around since 2000, allows businesses to track, measure and compare energy efficiency across hundreds of thousands of buildings all over the county. In addition to helping them make decisions on where to invest on energy-saving upgrades, owners can use it to generate reports and to ensure they’re complying with local mandates for energy use disclosure. 

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A  preliminary version of the 2026 federal budget proposal released in May doesn’t call out Energy Star and its portfolio manager software program by name, but it suggests eliminating funding for the EPA’s Office of Atmospheric Protection, which Energy Star falls under.

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Lee Zeldin, head of the EPA, in congressional testimony in May suggested his agency or the administration could privatize the program, which costs the government tens of millions of dollars a year. 

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“I have actually had multiple entities reach out to EPA over the course of the last few weeks because they want to take over Energy Star, which is a program that requires a big staff, a big taxpayer-funded staff, and a whole lot of tax dollars,” he said.