Transforming sustainability reporting: A look at the ESPM to GRESB toolkit | The Pulse by GRESB

In this episode of The Pulse by GRESB, we take a look at the brand new ESPM to GRESB toolkit—an innovative solution designed to simplify data integration. Our speakers walk us through how the toolkit streamlines the often complex process of translating data from the Energy Star Portfolio Manager system (ESPM) to GRESB. We explore the key differences between the two platforms, the common pain points in sustainability reporting, and how this new tool makes the process faster, more accurate, and more cost-effective. Tune in to this episode featuring:

Can’t listen? Read the full transcript below. Please note that edits have been made for readability.

Chris: Hello and welcome to the next episode of The Pulse by GRESB and I’m excited to talk about a topic I’m passionate about with one of the leading experts in the industry. We’re going to talk about how to move data from the Energy Star Portfolio Manager system, which is one of the most widely used data management platforms in the world, to the GRESB system. And so that is both a broadly applicable topic and something of a pain in the butt.

So we’re gonna talk to one of the leading experts on addressing that pain point. Rimas is with us. He is one of the leaders of Abisko, which is an innovative startup and GRESB Partner. And so we are going to dive right into this important topic. So Rimas, who are you? Where did you come from? And how did you get into this particular niche in the universe?

Rimas: Awesome. Thanks, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here. Yeah, my name is Rimas Gulbinas. I’m the head of Abisko. Really, my journey has been a very long one. I did my PhD in building energy systems a million years ago, and after that, I essentially got a Department of Energy grant to commercialize my first business, which was really working with a lot of cities to manage benchmarking initiatives more than anything. And, I started Abisko here just very recently to really take data management and analysis to the next level to really unlock decarbonization planning and investments across commercial portfolios. So that’s my short story. It’s a pleasure to be here and I’m looking forward to this discussion.

Chris: All right. I love that. So for folks who don’t know, let’s start with the basics. What is an ESPM? Why does it matter in the universe? What is Energy Star Portfolio Manager?

Rimas: Energy Star Portfolio Manager is the most reliable tank out there for managing data related to energy and emissions and essentially benchmarking performance of commercial buildings. It’s by far the most popular benchmarking platform in the world. There’s over 450,000 properties tracking their data.

And, very importantly, it really is the underlying platform for nearly every building performance standard and benchmarking policy across North America, that’s both in the United States and Canada. Essentially, property owners have to comply with these emerging initiatives. There’s about 140 now, either already active or just coming online, and Energy Star is required to both collect the data and report to these local municipalities. So it’s an unavoidable, but also very dependable platform for managing and benchmarking energy data.

Chris: Awesome. So anything with that many capabilities must be really expensive. What does it cost folks to use ESPM?

Rimas: Well, for the time being, it’s free. Um, so…

Chris: That’s an important driver. Okay. I totally get it. I was obviously being a little facetious, like we’re hoping that stays that way for all sorts of good reasons. Okay, so let’s go a little deeper. You have a lot of expertise in the nuts and bolts of this tool, as well as being intimately familiar with GRESB. Why isn’t it trivial? Like, okay, ESPM is collecting and storing energy, automated benchmarking, all the kind of goodness it does. And we’re talking about, okay, so that’s energy, water, emissions, all sorts of goodies. GRESB has some of the same information. Why isn’t this export and load, done? What makes these two things different? What are their key differences and similarities?

Rimas: Right. Well, the simple answer is they’re built for different requirements. Energy Star is really built and optimized for whole building energy and water reporting and benchmarking. Because of that, users are typically only concerned in aggregate data. They collect it. They make sure that it’s complete and they basically submit that for compliance with these ordinances.

GRESB, on the other hand, requires significantly more data than Energy Star A) maintains, but also has any intention of supporting in the future, mostly because it’s looking for different resolutions within the building. What’s the tenant breakdown? What’s the base building breakdown? How a utility is being required for exterior areas and parking? These types of metrics aren’t of concern for Energy Star, and therefore it wasn’t built to support them. And then the second point is, GRESB is a portfolio scale reporting standard and Energy Star is really built for whole building, or individual building reporting and benchmarking. So it lacks functionalities and features for understanding these trends at scale across portfolios.

Chris: Awesome. Okay. That is really helpful. Just maybe a tiny bit of color, but I’ll add just saying, hey, for folks who are outside the US, we had a lot of folks outside the US and be listening to this and understanding one of the things about Energy Star Portfolio Manager is Energy Star as a tool is also rooted in the American clean air act and an idea that whole building performance was the coin of the realm. The enabling legislation, the entire idea, it didn’t care about whether it was a base building or a tenant. It understood the building to be the source of energy demand, which indirectly was the source of air pollution. Cool. So that was the motivation.

So for folks in other parts of the world, I’m looking at you, Australia, or the UK, you care a lot about the division between the landlord and the tenant and ESPM just wasn’t set up that way because the regulatory construct didn’t care. So if you’re trying to keep up with, you know, why does it work this way? There’s a really good principled way that that reason it does. And there’s also a principled reason that GRESB works the way it does, because it inherited a more global view where tenant and landlord were really explicitly different. Okay. So there was a logic to them both. So as we get into this. Can you give us a few examples of how that matters?

Rimas: No, for sure. With regards to Energy Star, it’s because it’s based on whole building reporting. It really lacks a lot of the building and meter characteristics required for GRESB reporting. So, for example, something as simple as property ownership periods. GRESB wants users to provide extents of how they’re reporting performance data based on their ownership periods. Energy Star doesn’t have a place to enter that information, and therefore it has no way to integrate that into its annual reporting year metrics and analyses.

Then beyond that, something as, I mean, seemingly simple from the outside, reporting scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions breakdowns, right? Energy Star, because it is a whole building standard, is able to report direct and indirect location in market-based emissions, but because you can’t tag meters into individual space types, whether that’s space building, landlord, tenant or EV charging, you’re not able to actually come up with scope one, two and three emissions breakdowns. And then beyond that, you’re not able to actually track data coverage values across Energy Star. There’s a kind of an implicit assumption that if you’re reporting whole building data, you’re reporting at 100 percent data coverage. So you don’t have the ability to break down data coverages by utility type and space type.

And then further, you know, gap filling methodologies and other downstream requirements for GRESB reporting that often come into play in the face of incomplete data. Energy Star was not built to manage and support incomplete data. It’s basically just says keep going until you have perfect data. But GRESB is a little bit more practical and realistic, says, okay, well, let’s say you have 95 percent of your data completed. How do you fill those gaps? Right? So Energy Star doesn’t provide that incomplete or gap fill type of methodology. And that’s really why we built the tool: to loosen those constraints on Energy Star and allow users to maintain their profiles for compliance with these ordinances in North America. But then leverage that same data at minimal cost for something much more complex, like GRESB.

Chris: Awesome. Okay. Perfect segue. So I think we have scared people enough to say, okay, they now understand that there’s some things that are similar. There’s some things that are different. There’s principled reasons on both sides. How does your solution address those pain points? Tell us about the tool you’ve been building and what it does for a GRESB Participant who is also an ESPM user.
What’s the solution you guys are kicking out there?

Rimas: So when we started Abisko, we really started with the aim of being the most accurate Energy Star portfolio manager translator on the market. So that really means a few things. One, we want to make sure that our data models are fully consistent with Energy Star. So when we’re importing and analyzing them, there’s no information loss. A lot of solutions out there kind of just import Energy Star data, but they kind of square peg, round hole it. So they lose a lot of information when they import it.

Next, we worked really closely with Energy Star’s technical staff to make sure that our analytics yield metrics in the same exact way that Energy Star does when there is complete data. So that means that our analytics are very similar. We can integrate the way that Energy Star does green power calculations, emissions calculations, in a way that other solutions really struggle with. Now, once we have this consistency, which is super important for enabling kind of extended and more advanced analysis for compliance, planning and things of that nature, we’re also able to do other things with the data for GRESB reporting. Essentially, we’ve set up a tool that is a very good representation of your Energy Star data, translates it in a common format, and then allows users to really enrich that data with GRESB-specific information, and then generate compliant reports for GRESB reporting.

Chris: Awesome. All right, so who benefits the most? So I’ll put some words in your mouth when I think I get excited about your tool because it solves a problem we hear about from the GRESB universe. I am a happy ESPM user, I am an obligatory ESPM user. I’ve got my portfolio here. Maybe in the past, I remember fondly the old ESPM to GRESB spreadsheet, but I don’t have it anymore. So who would see the most benefits from using the tool that you’ve just described?

Rimas: I’ll start by saying, I remember hearing about this, an Energy Star to GRESB translator, and it seems like those were simpler times and sounds nice. But essentially, this toolkit is really built for North American customers who have properties that aren’t compliance zones and, probably the most common pattern that we’ve seen is the customer has a property in Energy Star. They configure it for whole building compliance and reporting, and they’re tracking a lot of additional data in what’s called out of metric meters. That’s your tenant submeter data, your base building data, EV charging data, things of that nature. So, these customers find it very difficult, and so do service providers that are helping these customers actually report to GRESB.

I think it’s important to note that this is built not just for building owners and investors, but also for their service providers. But essentially, we allow them to leverage their data, have the most accurate translation of that for GRESB, and the simplest and cheapest way to do it. So what we have is a very focused Energy Star to GRESB toolkit that we want to offer North American GRESB Members. That is really just optimized for that. And because the main data source is Energy Star, and we’re just kind of guiding them along, we can offer this at a cost that hopefully doesn’t break the bank for anybody. It’s an order of magnitude cheaper than a lot of solutions out there. And the whole goal is just to lower the barriers to entry for GRESB reporting, as well as minimizing those costs.

Chris: Awesome. Okay. Now that you’ve told them what it solves, who it’s for, let’s begin to land this plane. And as we take our time here, how do they learn more? How do they get this thing? When can they have it?

Rimas: Right. So we’re going to be releasing it here at the beginning of March. So we’ll be working with GRESB to spread the word there. Once that is fully released, it’s quite easy to sign up. All you need to do is go to abisko.io. You’ll see a link for the ESPM to GRESB toolkit, and over there you can basically just sign up and that will send us a notification, we’ll contact you, and then as a user, you just follow a few simple steps to get going, and that’s basically share your Energy Star properties with the Abisko Energy Star account. We will see that, and send you a registration link. You’ll obviously read the terms and conditions. And then we’ll give a short registration kind of training, and then you’ll be on your way where you’re enriching their data, generating audit reports, finding ways to improve the quality of your your data, all the way to GRESB reporting. So it’s gonna be very simple to sign up and start using the tool. You just get a registration link, share your Energy Star properties and start working.

Chris: That’s awesome. Okay. So I’ll land the plan here for a second with some thanks to you. Like one, I’m excited that you guys have done this. I mean, this is a pain point that North American GRESB Participants have expressed. And I’m- really exciting for your team to have stepped up and made a faster, better solution that gets higher quality data in a more rigorous way from the absolute most common platform into GRESB. So I really hope that people embrace that and see, hey, this is a direct response to what we’ve heard from participants about what they need, and we’re looking forward to their success in taking advantage of this tool.

We also want to recognize, I mean, in just in talking to you and doing this, your expertise, your understanding of how ESPM works and GRESB works. So if participants or other vendor partners are out there and they want someone who’s a real expert in this niche, I hope they’ll contact you as well. And so at a minimum, we’re grateful for your partnership. We are excited about this offering and we’re looking forward to making sure people know it’s there, when it rolls out to everybody. So thank you very much Rimas for your time. And I am hoping people will go check out the tool when it’s available, sign up and make their lives easier.

Rimas: Looking forward to it, Chris. Thank you.