If you own, lease, manage or operate buildings that are five-years-old or newer, you naturally might be reluctant to spend money on upgrades for a building that is considered new or nearly new. After all, you haven’t recovered your investment yet, and it seems a waste to take out or upgrade equipment or systems that are practically new and haven’t fully depreciated yet. Why would anyone do that?

Here’s one simple answer: energy cost savings. In many cases, an early investment in energy upgrades – or energy retrofitting – can provide enough cost savings to justify the expenditure, sometimes with paybacks as quick as one year.

To evaluate this for yourself, begin by “benchmarking” the energy performance of your building. For the first crude cut, assemble twelve months of energy bills, add up the dollar total for the year, and divide by the approximate square footage of the conditioned space served. An average figure for general office, space is around $1.25 per square foot. If you generate a figure of $2 per square foot or higher, you might want to consider taking steps to increase your energy efficiency.

For Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) International members, looking at the Experience Exchange Report and comparing your building’s performance with others submitted by other BOMA members is another comparison route you can take. A word of caution: your sample size may consist of just a handful of buildings, so the numbers may not be statistically valid.

For more thorough and accurate benchmarking, go to www.energystar.gov, click on “buildings” and find the Portfolio Manager. This online benchmarking tool allows you enter 12 months of utility bills, as well as additional key information about your building: (e.g., square footage, whether you have food service or a data center in the building, whether you have a parking garage covered by the base building electric meter, etc.). The Portfolio Manager generates a score from zero to 100. Any score above 75 is considered outstanding, and any building with that score is eligible to become Energy Star rated. A score below the average score of 50 tells you that you have some work to do.

If you benchmark your new, or nearly new, building using one of the three methods above and find it scores high on energy consumption, what are your options? The first, and most critical, step is to determine why.

There are only two ways to save money on energy: use less or pay less. For this space we’ll focus on the “use less” option. To use less energy you’ll need to perform an energy audit that will identify energy saving opportunities in two categories: 1) low cost/no cost operational measures that can payback in less than a year; and 2) capital improvement measures; i.e., energy retrofits.

If you are lucky, most of the savings you need can be found in the “low cost/no cost” category. Common examples of Operations and Maintenance (O&M) measures that are readily implemented include actions as simple as correcting equipment time settings on your Building Automation System (BAS). We have seen countless buildings – new and old – where the HVAC equipment is set to run for many hours after a building has emptied out for the day. Shutting off equipment when not in use, or engaging a temperature setback program (e.g., let your building temperature drift down to 55 degrees at night in winter or up to 90 degrees in summer), can save an enormous amount of energy – and dollars – provided your BAS is “smart” enough to know when to re-engage the HVAC in order to reach comfortable conditions by the time the building is occupied in the morning.

Sophisticated lighting controls can be tricky, but even simple ones won’t work if they are not connected. You may snicker, but we recently found that scenario in a year old office building during recommissioning.

Energy dollars are often wasted when a building is not being operated according to its design. Take, for example, a building equipped with an “economizer” cycle on the HVAC system (an “economizer” is intended to bring in fresh air during mild weather when mechanical heating or cooling is not really necessary). This is a terrific idea, but don’t overlook the operational training component. If the building’s maintenance personnel are not properly trained how to use system upgrades, your building is not getting the benefit of something that you paid for.

In fact, inadequate training of maintenance personnel – or worse, a lack of maintenance personnel, period – can lead to many energy-wasting practices in a building. A regular maintenance procedure that can be overlooked because it is easily forgotten is filter changing and cleaning. When air filters get dirty, the amount of energy required to force air through them increases. If filters become dirty and old enough, they can collapse, allowing grit and dust to collect on the HVAC heating and cooling coils and resulting in a huge drop in HVAC system efficiency.

Keep in mind, the age and outward appearance of a building doesn’t necessarily provide an accurate indication of its energy efficiency. It doesn’t matter how shiny new your building is if it is underperforming its peers. If this is the case – even after you have implemented the “low cost/no cost” operational measures – then you should consider energy system retrofits when they can be shown to be cost-effective.

Common (and commonly cost-effective) retrofits or upgrades can be as simple as installing hardware or software features to your Building Automation System that may have been cut from the project’s original design to meet budget targets (This practice is often called “value engineering,” but simply a cost-cutting exercise that can eliminate real value from a project). Or, perhaps cheaper but less efficient lighting was installed for the sake of reducing first costs, but now you – the long term owner – are paying the carrying costs.

A thorough and professional energy audit will reveal these and other opportunities for you, and provide you with savings and cost estimates to allow you to make an informed decision on what to do about high energy bills.

Wayne Robertson, LEED AP, is President of Energy Ace