By Jonathan Hiskes, Sustainable Industries Magazine

The political chatter in Seattle remains focused on the multi-billion-dollar car-only tunnel the state wants to build beneath the downtown waterfront, but away from the tunnel saga the city is quietly becoming a leader in squeezing energy waste out of its building stock.

Case in point: Today the city sent letters to more than 800 large commercial property owners and managers telling them it’s time to get started on the new energy benchmarking program that will expose energy waste – or, ideally, the lack of it.

Owners of commercial buildings larger than 50,000 square feet (generally, downtown towers) have until October to start disclosing the energy performance of their buildings. That information will be available to the city, the public and prospective buyers, tenants and lenders. The disclosure ordinance, passed last January, adheres to the maxim “you manage what you measure.” Tracking energy use and spending, in other words, is the first step to reducing it.

“Seattle’s buildings provide one of the greatest opportunities to generate energy savings and boost economic development for the city,” Department of Planning and Development director Diane Sugimura said in a news release. “This new program will help building owners take a key step toward increasing building energy efficiency, which, in turn, helps lower operating costs, makes buildings more competitive and creates good local jobs.”

Building owners, with help from energy utilities, will track performance using the U.S. EPA’s Energy Star Portfolio Manager, a free online tool. Beginning next April, the requirement will also extend to nonresidential and multifamily residential buildings 10,000 square feet or larger.

Downtown property owners haven’t been waiting for the city to kick them into action. A coalition of them, led by Brian Geller of ZGF Architects, is readying to launch an Architecture 2030 District – a sort of neighborhood-scale approach to the Architecture 2030 challenge, which aims to make buildings carbon neutral by 2030.

That, too, focuses more on sharing information and best practices than on concrete actions. Geller believes those will be fruitful steps.

“We’ve got a pretty small group of property owners who all own a lot of land,” he told me earlier this spring. “They’re all doing interesting things on their own, but they’re all a little siloed. They’ve all got their own goals and weren’t really talking to each other.”

The year-long process of planning the District is changing that, he said. And if property owners are willing to get serious about cutting electricity use in the land of uber-cheap hydropower, Geller believes it will be easier to replicate elsewhere in the country.

“Energy’s been cheap for so long that it’s been cheaper to run a building badly than to pay a person to go through it and fix things,” he said. “If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere.”

Local energy businesses see the promise of building efficiency too. Beyond the much-heralded McKinstry, startups like EnergySavvy are linking the region’s IT expertise with the efficiency challenge. The Seattle company announced this week that it’s providing software support to two of the most notable Northwest home efficiency projects, Clean Energy Works Oregon and Seattle’s Community Power Works, which together plan to retrofit 8,000 homes.