Commercial office building tenants breathe a sigh of relief when mild summer weather reduces utility costs from their heights in the winter. But you can still continue to review the energy efficiency of your operations to lower costs and boost profitability.

At first glance, the task may seem easy. People today can pick the latest in fluorescent lighting, electronic controls and heating and cooling equipment. Technological advances put their energy efficiency well beyond that of similar equipment made just 10 years ago.

But when you really start looking at it, making the right choices seems complex. Most building managers and owners are not electrical engineers, making it difficult to assess true energy savings from a piece of equipment. This complicates the job of evaluating vendors’ bids and getting a reasonably accurate figure on cost savings.

With owners’ bills for efficiency improvements sometimes running a few hundred thousand dollars, uncertainty over savings can torpedo a deal. Not knowing what 50 cents a square foot in energy savings means to them, building owners sometimes see paying for efficient improvements as risky. And with conservation potentially reducing the fees that tenants pay for escalating utility costs, the owner may not receive the entire benefit.

To get the best results, it pays to hire specialists. Building owners can hire a firm to audit their energy use and then engineer, design, install and arrange financing for efficiency projects. With the goal of curbing consumption, many large office buildings have undertaken some energy efficiency projects, from new lighting to better controls. Large buildings have the potential to reduce consumption up to 25% with the right technology.

Boosting efficiency has become more common across the country:

• Fewer buildings light 100% of their space when occupied, and more buildings turn off’ all their lights when closed. More buildings use efficient compact fluorescent and halogen bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs. And electronic ballasts for fluorescent bulbs have surged in popularity over their less efficient magnetic counterparts.
• More buildings package their heating and air-conditioning units—these are all-in-one units that serve the entire building and save more energy than individual office heaters and air conditioners.
• More buildings also have electronic controls to vary air volumes and heating and cooling cycles to achieve the right temperatures while wasting little energy. Building managers have also stepped up maintenance of heating and cooling units to prevent waste.

Controlling temperature has become more critical as the number of personal computers has grown since 1995. Today’s offices feature fewer square feet per worker, intensifying the combination of body heat and computer equipment heat. This increased load factor, or the amount of heat an air conditioning unit must expel from the building to control its temperature, makes the units work harder and use more energy.

Companies should regularly audit their building’s energy use, beginning by making sure their electricity rate structure is correct for the building’s use. Do an inventory of all systems that consume energy. Once this audit is complete, you can determine if you can replace any systems with the latest technology.

Lighting is the easiest area to remedy, with modern electronic ballasts using fewer bulbs and half the electricity to produce the same or better quality lighting than older fluorescent lighting. The payback periods are sometimes a year to 18 months, which is nothing in the life of the building. Sealing air leaks in a building’s shell is another avenue paved with savings.

Heating and air-conditioning units are more costly to replace, but it may be worth it if the equipment is at the end of its economic life anyway. Regular cleaning of filters and adjustment of fan belts on any system increases operating efficiency and decreases costs. Reducing utility costs, which can run 20% or more of total operating costs, can boost profits and make buildings more competitive in the market, adding value for their owners or potential buyers.

Investing in a computerized energy management system can save money. The system reads thousands of sensors inside and outside the building and analyzes historical data to determine the best times to start and stop the building’s chillers, lights and other equipment. While energy management systems can cost $200,000 and higher, the system can pay for itself by cutting energy consumption.

Tenant Representation Flo Chart by Michael Coretz