The mayors from 10 major U.S. cities announced they will undertake a united effort to significantly boost energy efficiency in their buildings.
The mayors will be participating in the new City Energy Project (CEP), an initiative from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Institute for Market. The following 10 cities will be CEP’s first participants: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Orlando, Philadelphia, and Salt Lake City.
HOW IT WORKS
Through this new project, the cities will develop their own locally tailored plans to advance energy efficiency and reduce waste in their large buildings, which can represent roughly 50% of their citywide square footage. These plans, which will include multiple integrated strategies, can make more progress in each city than any one program or policy could alone.
The CEP will offer energy expertise to help guide the cities through the planning, designing, and implementing processes. The energy efficiency solutions that CEP will help the cities develop are flexible to each city’s unique situation, supporting the following goals:
- Promote efficient building operations: Strong building energy performance can be achieved through efficient operations and maintenance, and the training of facilities personnel.
- Encourage private investment: Common-sense solutions to financial and legal barriers to energy efficiency should be adopted to increase private investment in building energy improvements.
- City leadership: Cities should lead by example and reduce taxpayer-funded energy consumption in municipal buildings, and encourage the private sector to match their actions.
- Promote transparency: Building energy performance information should be transparent and accessible to enable market demand and competition for energy-efficient buildings.
The CEP is projected to cut a combined total of 5 to 7 million tons of carbon emissions annually. To put that in perspective, that is equivalent to taking 1 million to 1.5 million passenger vehicles off the road per year, the amount of electricity used by roughly 700,000 to nearly 1 million American homes annually, or taking three to four power plants offline.
The project is funded by a partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and The Kresge Foundation, and the City Energy Project.
