EPA also honored 13 Energy Star Leaders businesses, school districts, and healthcare institutions from across the country that have improved energy efficiency by implementing the Energy Star assessment and rating system. These companies, school districts and healthcare organizations have measured the energy efficiency of all their buildings and achieved energy efficiency improvements of approximately 10 percent or 20 percent, or achieved overall top performance.
Commercial and institutional buildings use about $80 billion worth of energy each year and contribute about 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. EPA estimates that if each building owner met the challenge, in 10 years they would reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the emissions from 15 million cars while saving about $10 billion each year.
EPA offers its national building energy performance rating system to support this challenge. This rating system has already been used to assess the energy efficiency of almost 20,000 buildings across the country.
