“Emerging Best Practice for Underwriting Commercially-
Attractive Energy Efficiency Loans”

Sponsored by Sustainable Real Estate Solutions, Inc. (SRS)
Presented by Anthony J. Buonicore, P.E.
Chairman of the ASTM Building Energy Performance Task Group

Join our Webinar
Presented On: April 13, 2012, 1:00 PM
Presentation: 1 Hour
Q & A: 30 Minutes
Emerging Best Practice for Underwriting Commercially-Attractive Energy Efficiency Loans

The commercial real estate market, consisting of almost five million office, retail, service, lodging, multifamily, warehouse and storage buildings in the U.S., represents a significant opportunity for stakeholders to monetize energy savings. The availability of commercially-attractive financing for building energy efficiency projects has been a major obstacle to market growth. However, financing programs, including PACE and others, are now able to overcome these obstacles and provide multiple commercially-attractive financing structures. This webinar will explore these commercially-attractive financing structures and the emerging best practice to underwrite these loans. Two case studies will be presented.

The webinar will cover:

• The significant pent-up demand for deep energy retrofits
• The keys to energy efficiency investment
• The criteria for commercially-attractive financing
• Commercially-attractive financing options
• The advantage of PACE programs
• The emerging best practice for underwriting energy efficiency loans
• Credit enhancements that can make lending even more attractive
• Case studies

The webinar will be of special interest to:

• Commercial building owners and managers
• Energy consultants and energy auditors
• ESCOs
• Energy service providers
• Building engineers and architects
• Bankers and financers
• PACE program participants
• Attorneys

Presented by:
Anthony J. Buonicore, P.E., BCEE, QEP
Managing Director, Buonicore Partners, LLC
Chairman, ASTM Building Energy Performance Assessment Task Group

Moderator:
Brian J. McCarter
Chairman & CEO, Sustainable Real Estate Solutions, Inc. (SRS)

We have entered a new era of constrained spending, high unemployment and complex political turmoil, yet the question on everyone’s mind is simple:   How do we create jobs?

Surprisingly, the answer is right in front of us…..

TRUMBULL, CT – MARCH 28, 2012 – Sustainable Real Estate Solutions, Inc. (SRS), the industry leader in on-demand building energy assessment and proprietary benchmarking software, is featured as a pioneering business in a new report on energy disclosure and job creation by the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT), a nonprofit in Washington, DC.

The report, Energy Disclosure and the New Frontier for American Jobs, profiles business leaders in the emerging field of building energy management who are adding jobs and expanding their client rosters.  The report shows how a new kind of energy policy is creating skilled, export-proof jobs in cities across the United States.  Under regulations that promote these building energy rating and disclosure policies, owners of large buildings can track exactly how much energy their properties use.  Armed with this information, they can make intelligent changes that reduce their utility bills and those of their tenants – helping everyone’s bottom line.  Five cities and two states have already adopted such policies.  If there were a national policy, IMT research finds, 23,000 net new jobs would be added in 2015 and 59,000 jobs in 2020.  (download report)

As an experienced Energy Star Automated Benchmarking Partner, SRS’s Sustainable Real Estate Manager^® software platform seamlessly integrates Energy Star benchmark ratings supporting client needs for building energy labeling and disclosure regulatory compliance. 

Brian J. McCarter, CEO of SRS said “As a further benefit the SRS platform integrates SRS’s proprietary Peer Building Benchmarking™ database of over 120,000 buildings nationwide.  Updated regularly, the data encompasses 15 property types, 3.3 billion square feet and over $7.8 billion in annual energy costs and provides stakeholders with the industry’s most comprehensive best practice for benchmarking (e.g., comparing a building’s energy consumption, costs and overall efficiency to “peer” buildings of comparable size, use, and location – ZIP code, CBSA, state, climate region, nationwide) resulting in an unparalleled benchmarking analysis.”

About Sustainable Real Estate Solutions, Inc. (SRS)

SRS, an industry leader in on-demand building energy performance assessment and proprietary benchmarking software, delivers Sustainable Real Estate Manager^® an Internet-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) workflow platform enabling building stakeholders to assess, benchmark and optimize the energy and sustainability performance of their properties.  For more information, visit www.SRMnetwork.com.

About The Institute for Market Transformation (IMT)

IMT is a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting energy efficiency, green building, and environmental protection in the United States and abroad. Much of IMT’s work addresses market failures that inhibit investment in energy efficiency.  For more information, visit www.imt.org.

Transmission constraints, energy efficiency financing and methane capture are no problem for the former president.

Katherine Tweed: February 29, 2012

Former President Bill Clinton stepped onto the stage at ARPA-E’s third annual Energy Innovation Summit to a standing ovation. He started off by reminding the tech-savvy crowd that he was “famously technologically challenged.” He then reflected on his position of being a former president, adding, “One of the saddest things about being a former president is no one might care what you think.”

For Bill Clinton, that statement couldn’t be further from the truth. The ballroom was packed with a receptive crowd of innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists and policymakers. Everyone wanted to hear what he had to say.

Despite his technological handicap, Clinton delivered. He echoed the upbeat vibe that has permeated EIS 2012, but he was honest in saying that despite the exciting work being done by those in the room, there was a gap between the trendlines of moving toward cleaner energy at lowering costs and the headlines that play into partisan politics.

He didn’t just wax poetic about the state of the energy economy — he also offered concrete solutions, including one to finance and build interstate transmission, capturing rapidly dispersing greenhouse gases for energy, and tips on how to move forward to grab the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency.

Like Bill Gates the day before, Clinton called for far more money for ARPA-E for developments in solar, batteries and electrofuels that are being financed by the young agency.

His most novel suggestion revolved around transmission, another sticky issue for the federal government that Bill Gates brought up the previous day at the conference. There are more than 300,000 megawatts of wind power waiting to come online due to transmission constraints, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Clinton suggested the best way to finance transmission was to build an infrastructure bank, an idea that he said once had bipartisan support. He suggested the government put in a small (for the government) amount of money of a few billion dollars and have corporations match the funds or exceed them to get future returns on the investment.

Clinton argued companies could invest money if they are allowed to repatriate money from oversees. If they don’t put it into the infrastructure bank, where companies will certainly earn a return, they would have to pay taxes on it at the long-term capital gains rate.

After solving the transmission financing issue — although he did not touch upon the 800-pound gorilla of siting these energy highways — Clinton moved quickly on to the issue of greenhouse gases, such as methane. “This is not rocket science,” he argued. “We need a system in America to more rapidly disperse greenhouse gases.”

He noted that there was no reason the U.S. shouldn’t have a federal finance model for capturing GHG from landfills and agricultural waste. A successful model could also be an example for the rest of the world. Unlike transmission, Clinton did not offer an example of what that might look like, especially with low natural gas prices. One firm that was at ARPA-E, FlexEnergy, can work with low-quality methane, making the payback potentially achievable for municipalities with landfill gas that is currently being flared. The technology, however, is still young and is in pilots.

In Orange County, the FlexEnergy system of eight power stations is expected to pay for itself in five to six years based on the revenue from the gas, as well as from the money that will be saved in fees to monitor and maintain the flare that currently burns the methane at the landfill. Theoretically, a federal policy that regulated the treatment of landfill gas could help scale methane capture and processing technologies.

Another area that the former president argued needs a more cohesive federal policy is energy efficiency, the energy issue he is most closely tied to. The Clinton Foundation helped build the framework for Obama’s Better Buildings Initiative, which will provide $4 billion for commercial building energy efficiency retrofits.  

He pointed to the most oft-cited retrofit, the Empire State Building, which has cut its energy use and utility bills by about 40 percent. The upgrades — which included custom windows for the Art Deco masterpiece — will pay for themselves in five years.

Of course, the average building owner does not have the cash reserves of the landmark building, nor will the average school building or small office employ the likes of Honeywell, Siemens or Johnson Controls to do the upgrades.

“This is a huge deal for America’s unemployment problem,” said Clinton. Instead of the largest building companies, non-college-educated, middle-aged people could do the work if they were trained as assessors or even contractors for many retrofits. The problem, however, is that “there’s no national ‘Say Yes’ system here.”

A ‘Say Yes’ system could include decoupled utilities that offer on-bill financing. The United Kingdom will implement a system along those lines later this year with its Green Deal, which will pump $20 billion for retrofits into the market. Private capital has put up the money and billing will go through the utility, but all upgrades will be done through companies approved through one federal system.

Clinton argued for PACE financing to not only come back to California, but be implemented nationally. He argued against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which claim it drives down the value of mortgages. “This sterile and meaningless debate has kept Congress from doing this nationwide.”

Even if PACE financing does not come back or go nationwide, Clinton offered a call to arms.  “Focus on being more systematically effective in energy efficiency,” urged Clinton. “Once people know the facts, no one is against this, but there are too few non-college-educated people that understand the huge impact this could have on their future.”

Energy Efficiency:  A way for colleges to save and make money?

By Elisa Wood
February 23, 2012

 The Obama administration – and every parent with a child in college – is concerned about the ever-escalating cost of higher education. And for good reason. Tuition, room and board rose 37 percent for undergraduates at public colleges and 25 percent at private colleges (adjusted for inflation) from 2000 to 2010, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

 Colleges are enormous energy users. National Grid says that in the Northeast, a US higher education hub, a typical 50,000-square foot college building uses more than $200,000 of energy annually. So one way for colleges to reduce costs is through greater energy efficiency, especially if it is financed adeptly.

 The Green Revolving Fund offers an interesting model. Basically, the college sets aside money in a fund to make energy efficiency improvements, and then uses the money saved on energy bills to replenish the fund and make more improvements to further drive down energy bills.

 About 50 colleges have established GRFs, and they are achieving a median annual return on investment of 30 percent, according to Mark Orlowski, executive director of Sustainable Endowments Institute, who presented a recent webinar on the funds through the Yale Center for Business and the Environment.

 A GRF removes energy efficiency from competition for college resources. Energy improvements cease to be a burden on the operating budgets, and conversation about efficiency transforms into one about investment and re-investment. Colleges find seed money for GRFs from a variety of sources, including reserve funds, alumni donations, endowments and utilities.

 The Sustainable Endowments Institute and several partners have launched a challenge to raise college GRF funds to a cumulative $1 billion, up from the current $65 million. Existing funds vary in size from $5,000 at the College of Wooster in Ohio to $25.45 million at Standard University. The average fund is $1.4 million, according to SEI.  The funds can be found in 25 states, and at colleges as big as University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with 42,000 students and as small as Kalamazoo College with an enrollment of 1,381. Students, themselves, started the programs at 17 of the schools.

 A recent blog by Joe Indvik posted by the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education offers several good reasons for colleges to pursue GRFs over other ways to invest in efficiency. For example, he points to the “sizzle” factor.  “A GRF is a unified, purposeful investment vehicle that is easy to market and generates a more positive public image than traditional investments. It demonstrates concrete commitment to sustainability in a way that one-time investments cannot,” he says.

 This is not a new concept. Harvard has had a GRF for  more than a decade. But the idea has taken off in recent years, with about three quarters of GRFs formed since 2008.  Energy efficiency companies would be wise to track their creation, since they clearly open the door to new business opportunities. More details can be found at www.greenbillion.org and http://www.endowmentinstitute.org/

SRS Platform Capability Provides Missing Link to the Question: “What is the Impact to my Building’s Energy Star Rating from Investing in Specific Energy Conservation Measures?”

TRUMBULL, CT – FEBRUARY 23, 2012 – Sustainable Real Estate Solutions, Inc. (SRS), the industry leader in on-demand building energy assessment and proprietary benchmarking software, today announced the availability of its Energy Star Projected Rating capability.

A fully-integrated component of SRS’s Sustainable Real Estate Manager^® software platform, this innovative functionality allows commercial and public building stakeholders to determine their building’s projected Energy Star rating based on the installation of specific energy conservation measures (ECMs).  This “missing link” capability enables energy service companies to determine an optimized bundle of ECMs and the related key financial metrics.  The result is a technically-sound, transparent methodology consistent with leading industry standards that provides the user with an unprecedented level of confidence in the projected energy savings.

As a further benefit, seamless integration with SRS’s proprietary peer building benchmarking solution provides stakeholders with the industry’s most comprehensive “best practice” for benchmarking (e.g., comparing a building’s energy consumption, costs and overall efficiency to “peer” buildings of comparable size, use, and location).  SRS’s Peer Building Benchmarking™ database contains over 120,000 buildings nationwide.  Updated regularly, the data encompasses 15 property types, 3.3 billion square feet and over $7.8 billion in annual energy costs. 

“SRS’s Energy Star Projected Rating tool is a game-changer that for the first time enables industry participants to accurately project their building’s Energy Star rating based on the completion of specific ECMs”, noted Brian J. McCarter, SRS CEO.  He added, “As an experienced Energy Star Automated Benchmarking Partner, SRS is frequently asked; “How will my building’s Energy Star rating be impacted by the implementation of specific ECMs?”  With this new SRS platform capability stakeholders can now answer that question in a technically supportable manner with a high degree of confidence facilitating energy efficiency investments.”

About Sustainable Real Estate Solutions, Inc. (SRS)

SRS, an industry leader in on-demand building energy performance assessment and proprietary benchmarking software, delivers Sustainable Real Estate Manager^® an Internet-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) workflow platform enabling building stakeholders to assess, benchmark and optimize the energy and sustainability performance of their properties.  Its Peer Building Benchmarking^™ database contains over 120,000 buildings nationwide encompassing 15 property types comprising 3.3 billion square feet, over $7.8 billion in annual energy costs and $635 million in annual water/sewer costs and has reinvented commercial real estate’s energy efficiency benchmarking best practice.  For more information, visit www.SRMnetwork.com.

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Contact:

Sustainable Real Estate Solutions, Inc.

Brian J. McCarter

(203) 459-0567