Tishman Speyer – Shawn Peterson – 2015

Goals

Tishman Speyer, a real estate building and operating company, enlisted EDF Climate Corps fellow Shawn Peterson to evaluate retrofit strategies for emergency lighting. At the same time, the Global Sustainability team was seeking input on reporting opportunities through a newly launched Environmental Management System (EMS).

Solutions

After collecting data on emergency lighting assemblies across nearly 14 million square feet of building space, Peterson developed a comprehensive model to aggregate total energy consumption and project savings for several retrofit approaches. In the end, two preferred strategies were identified that capitalized on utility incentives, limited retrofit complexity and maintained emergency power back-up functionality.

Peterson also developed a roadmap towards a sustainability report compliant with global reporting standards. Specifically, recommendations were made to align performance metrics against GRI G4 guidance while launching a stakeholder engagement initiative to achieve buy-in. Peterson also found opportunity to expand EMS data collection towards design and construction operations while recommending add-ons that would save time in disclosing under frameworks such as GRESB, the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark, and GRI, the Global Reporting Initiative.

Potential Impact

Annually, energy savings from the emergency lighting retrofits could total over 620,000 kilowatt hours. Both retrofit strategies identified have IRR’s above 20 percent despite significant upgrades to ensure compatibility with emergency power back-up function. Also, Peterson’s roadmap puts Tishman Speyer on track to begin crafting its first sustainability report in compliance with GRI G4 guidelines while expanding the EMS to other core operations within the organization.