Sustainable Data Strategy

With EnergyStar potentially going away, this is a perfect moment to pivot from “reporting-only” to integrating integrate energy performance data into investment strategy and capital planning.”

The U.S. EPA’s EnergyStar Portfolio Manager has long been a backbone for utility data management and ESG reporting for many real estate sustainability teams. However, the program now faces credible threats of defunding or dismantling. This poses both a short-term risk to reporting obligations and a longer-term strategic challenge to energy efficiency and decarbonization plans.

Rather than seek another stopgap solution, this is a timely opportunity for real estate funds to modernize data infrastructure, reduce dependence on external platforms, and position themselves to make more data-driven capital planning decisions aligned with their Net Zero 20X0 commitments.

What to do instead? Pursue the following hybrid approach that protects short-term compliance, supports long-term investment strategy, and ensures data accessibility and integrity across teams. 

What is EnergyStar Reporting Portfolio Manager?

For the uninitiated: the EnergyStar Portfolio Manager is a free, web-based tool developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that allows property owners and managers to track energy and water consumption, benchmark building performance, and measure greenhouse gas emissions across their portfolios. It has been widely adopted in the commercial real estate sector for more than two decades and is considered a de facto standard for benchmarking building energy efficiency in the U.S. 

What is Happening

Under the current administration, the EnergyStar program has been explicitly listed for elimination or severe funding cuts. We won’t know for some time what if any elements of the program will remain in place. Regardless, continued investments in its underlying technology infrastructure may be underwhelming for the foreseeable future, and any sudden loss or degradation of the system would create immediate compliance risks, disrupt reporting cycles, and complicate energy performance tracking across large portfolios.

Why This Matters Now

• Regulatory exposure is increasing. In addition to CDP and GRESB, real estate owners are now subject to local building performance standards (e.g., NYC LL97, Boston BERDO), EU directives (EPBD), and NABERS in Australia. All require robust, granular utility data.
• Net-zero planning depends on high-quality data. Decarbonization modeling, ROI analysis of retrofits, and scenario planning require performance-level data—not just reporting-level data.
• You can’t afford to have your data held hostage. Many commercial tools lock in data or fail to offer full transparency and control, limiting agility as your needs evolve.

You Have Options

The good news is that you have options.

Ideally, you could build your own enterprise utility data infrastructure and stand up a centralized cloud-based system to directly ingest, normalize, and store utility data across the portfolio directly from sources: utility APIs, third-party bill aggregators, smart meters – fully owned and managed by you. While this option provides the highest level of control, you may not have the organizational bandwidth to implement and maintain it at the required scale.

Alternatively, you could use a commercial energy and ESG platform (e.g., Measurabl, Envizi, Fabriq, Accuvio) to import, manage, and report utility data. While these tools offer operational efficiency and compliance coverage, they do not offer sufficient long-term data independence or integration flexibility for a net-zero investment strategy.

To balance continuity, control and future-readiness, I recommend you pursue a hybrid strategy that includes building your own utility data lake as your core system of record, deploying a light-weight compliance and dashboard layer, and integrating performance data into investment and capital planning.

This hybrid approach avoids both organizational overload and data hostage risk. It ensures continuity for compliance, improves investment decision-making, and gives you full flexibility to evolve as regulatory and internal needs change.

Go Well Beyond Compliance Reporting

Remember, this is more than a risk mitigation exercise—it’s a chance to make your utility and energy data a true asset to the business. With the hybrid model, you can stay nimble, meet disclosure requirements, and lay the foundation for smarter decarbonization investments in the years to come.

This last point is crucial. To integrate energy performance data into investment strategy and capital planning, you need more granular data and you need control over it. That means working closely with the CIO and CFO on developing protocols for using energy and emissions data in investment and capital allocation processes.

This is where the real value is. It allows you to prioritize retrofit projects using internal carbon pricing or IRR thresholds; run financial models for electrification or DER deployment scenarios; and integrate with financial planning tools for full lifecycle impact analysis. It also readies you for AI and predictive tools to forecast building performance post-retrofit and compare different decarbonization pathways (electrification, solar, retrofit packages, and the like).