GRESB has partnered with Abisko to offer North American members and service providers a new toolkit for leveraging ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager® (ESPM) to accurately and cost-effectively report to GRESB.
ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager®
Launched nearly 25 years ago by the US Environmental Protection Agency, ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager® is the most popular commercial building energy benchmarking platform in the world, with over 450,000 properties tracking energy, water, waste, and emissions data.
At the heart of ESPM is the eponymous Energy Star Score, a statistically robust building performance benchmark based on the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), which is administered across the United States every four years. Property owners leverage ESPM and Energy Star scores to benchmark their properties, identify opportunities to improve energy efficiency, and reduce emissions across their portfolios. In recent years, ESPM has also emerged as the de facto reporting platform for nearly every local energy and emissions benchmarking policy and building performance standard in the United States and Canada.
The wide adoption of ESPM and the fact that it is free to all users has resulted in a diverse ecosystem of stakeholders who leverage the platform to advance decarbonization. This includes over 500 GRESB participants who use ESPM to track data for tens of thousands of properties to comply with local regulatory requirements.
Abisko & ESPM
Abisko is a user-friendly sustainability platform that simplifies global reporting, local compliance, and decarbonization across real estate portfolios. As an industry-leader in BPS & Benchmarking compliance management, Abisko is the only platform designed to maintain full consistency with ESPM data models, calculation methodologies, and conversion tables. This allows Abisko to easily incorporate major ESPM updates as they are released (e.g. 11/2024: RECs, Green Power, Emissions Updates), which other solutions cannot support due to incompatible data structures. It also enables Abisko to unlock the full value of ESPM by extending ESPM data models with powerful analytics for portfolio-scale data quality tracking, performance reporting, compliance management, and decarbonization planning.
An “ESPM First” approach enables Abisko to provide an efficient solution for users to leverage their ESPM data for more complex global and investor reporting requirements.
GRESB audit & verification
GRESB partnered with Abisko to release the “ESPM to GRESB” toolkit, a fully compliant and cost-effective way for members to track, validate, and enrich ESPM data for GRESB reporting. Over several months, Abisko worked directly with GRESB staff to audit all methodologies, algorithms, and assumptions and to verify all energy, emissions, water, waste calculations, gap-filling methodologies, REC attributions, data availability algorithms, and more.
In addition to simplifying GRESB, the toolkit helps users improve the accuracy and completeness of their ESPM profiles. Third-party platforms often push inaccurate and incomplete data to ESPM, resulting in profiles with potential compliance and reporting issues. Users can leverage the toolkit’s dashboard and Excel reports to cost-effectively validate ESPM data and identify data quality issues (e.g. gaps, overlaps, jumps). Users and service providers can also generate comprehensive reports to support external analyses based on meter, property, and portfolio-scale data that can be output in any unit and time scale. With the toolkit, users can be assured that they are in full compliance with GRESB guidelines and that they are reporting the most accurate and complete translation of their ESPM data.
The toolkit: What, when, and how much?
The toolkit will be publicly available in March 2025.
Users can start using the toolkit simply by sharing their ESPM profiles with Abisko. After receiving a login to access their portfolio, they can begin enriching their ESPM data via intuitive workflows for:
- Collecting additional property characteristics required for GRESB
- Setting reporting levels and defining landlord/tenant spaces
- Assigning meters to spaces and addressing data quality issues
- Defining and validating data coverages for utility and space types
- Generating a submission-ready GRESB Asset Spreadsheet
Users can leverage dashboards to track data quality and performance trends across their portfolio and to identify opportunities to increase GRESB scoring. Furthermore, bulk import templates are available to make it easier to add property characteristics, certifications, measures, space definitions, meter assignments, data coverages, and more. ESPM data is synced on a nightly basis and users can generate energy, emissions, water, and waste data audits on-demand to analyze data quality and performance metrics across meters, spaces, properties, and portfolios.
At USD 150 per property, the toolkit is the most cost-effective and accurate way to leverage ESPM for GRESB reporting. To support this low cost, access to the toolkit will be available from February 1 to July 1, allowing participants to prepare and complete their submission(s) during GRESB reporting period (April 1–July 1). After July 1, access will be frozen until the following reporting season, at which point previously collected data will be made available for returning users. For year-round access, users will be able to upgrade to a full Abisko license, which includes additional market-leading features for compliance management, decarbonization planning, benchmarking (and more) for a fraction of the cost of competing solutions.
Abisko and GRESB will continue to engage members, investors, service providers, and other stakeholders to gather feedback about the toolkit and to plan its future expansions to support other common reporting frameworks.
To learn more about the toolkit, or to join a toolkit working group to inform future development, please contact [email protected].