New Metrics

New Rating Helps Apartment Buildings Save Water & Energy

WegoWise, a building intelligence provider, has launched a new rating for apartment building energy efficiency performance.WegoScore is a simple numerical assessment that provides a clear snapshot of a building’s utility usage, enabling property owners to prioritize retrofits, better manage their portfolios and communicate building efficiency to tenants. The rating condenses numerous complex measurements of building performance into one number. It is a tool for the real estate industry to communicate efficiency efforts among owners, managers and occupants. It also can highlight superior asset management practices to the financial markets.

By Mike Hower | Published 10 years ago | About a 2 minute read

WegoWise, a building intelligence provider, has launched a new rating for apartment building energy efficiency performance.

WegoScore is a simple numerical assessment that provides a clear snapshot of a building’s utility usage, enabling property owners to prioritize retrofits, better manage their portfolios and communicate building efficiency to tenants. The rating condenses numerous complex measurements of building performance into one number. It is a tool for the real estate industry to communicate efficiency efforts among owners, managers and occupants. It also can highlight superior asset management practices to the financial markets.

Building on the progress of LEED and other green certifications, WegoScore grades all aspects of buildings’ ongoing utility performance rather than a building’s design or construction. With the largest collection of multifamily building performance data in the world — including over 2.6 million utility bills tracked to date — WegoWise says it has the unique capability to create an accurate efficiency rating.

How WegoScore works:

WegoWise assesses buildings for three separate WegoScores: energy, water and carbon.
The scoring algorithm examines the normalized usages for buildings of a given type (highrise, lowrise, etc.) in a particular climate.
A building is given a WegoScore from 1-100 based on where it falls in the resulting distribution.
The WegoScore is a grade rather than a rank, capturing and reflecting the relative difference between buildings’ performances.

Buildings with exceptionally high scores receive certificates and decals to promote their achievement.

Energy efficiency is estimated to be a multi-hundred-billion dollar investment opportunity in the United States, but better policies are required to unlock broad-based financing from institutional investors, according to a 2013 report by Ceres and its Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR). The report says utility regulation, demand-generating policies, and innovative financing policies have the potential of taking energy efficiency financing to a scale sufficient enough to attract significant institutional investment.

Increasing efficiency and the use of renewables will be critical to averting a global water crisis by 2040, according to two recent reports by CNA Corporation, a nonprofit research and analysis organization. The research, which explores the links between electric power generation and water use, also offers recommendations for strategic steps that can be taken to reduce power companies’ heavy dependence on water, which can enhance the reliability of power generation.

Mike Hower

Founder & Principal Consultant, Hower Impact

Mike Hower is the founder of Hower Impact — a boutique consultancy delivering best-in-class strategic communication advisory and support for corporate sustainability, ESG and climate tech.

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