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Green Bragging Rights: Cities with the Most Energy Star Buildings

March 31, 2015

Good schools, high employment and low crime used to be the bragging (or shame) points for city mayors. Now green and clean energy also tops the list. How many Energy Star buildings are within your city? Here’s the EPA list.

Elisa Wood

Good schools, high employment and low crime used to be the bragging (or shame) points for city mayors. Now green and clean energy also tops the list. This week the Environmental Protection Agency offered up another metric for mayors to consider when comparing their energy performance to others: How many Energy Star buildings are within your borders?

Among large cities, Washington, D.C. topped the 2015 list with 480 Energy Star buildings, followed close behind by Los Angeles with 475 buildings and then Atlanta with 328 buildings. (Scroll to full list below.)

Among mid-sized cities, the top three were in Virgina Beach/Norfolk/Newport News, Virginia with 81 buildings; San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, California with 70 buildings; and then Austin/Round Rock, Texas with 65 buildings.

Odessa, Texas was number one for small cities, with 31 buildings. All of the Energy Star buildings in Odessa are schools and school administration offices. They total 3.1 million square feet, and have saved $2.4 million in energy costs, the equivalent of the annual electricity use of 1,800 homes.

Number two for small cities was Daphne/Fairhope/Foley, Alabama with 27 buildlings. Third place went to Sioux City, Iowa with 24 buildings.

In all, 25,000 buildings across America have won Energy Star designations since 1999. The EPA says that the buildings have saved nearly $3.4 billion on utility bills and prevented greenhouse gas emissions equal to the emissions from the annual electricity use of nearly 2.4 million homes.

The federal government has been putting a lot of effort into decreasaing energy use in commercial buildings because they account for 17 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions at a cost of more than $100 billion per year, according to the EPA. Energy Star buildings use an average of 35 percent less energy and are responsible for 35 percent fewer emissions than typical buildings.

To create the annual top cities list, EPA tallies the number of Energy Star certified buildings for the end of the previous year within each metropolitan area. These areas include surrounding towns and suburbs.

Below is a list of the top 25 cities. See the mid-size and small city list here.

TOP 25 CITIES

Rank	Metro area	Building Count	Total Floor Area (Million Sq ft)	Cost savings (million $)	Equivalent Homes’ Electricity Use for 1 Year	2014 rank	2013 rank	2012 rank	2011 rank	2010 rank	2009 rank
1	Washington, DC	480	122.8	127.1	73,500	2	2	2	2	2	4
2	Los Angeles	475	109.7	155.8	44,300	1	1	1	1	1	1
3	Atlanta	328	69.6	55.8	48,700	3	5	3	6	9	9
4	New York	299	109.7	137.7	50,700	4	4	6	5	10	12
5	San Francisco	292	75.3	118.9	34,600	5	6	5	3	3	2
6	Chicago	251	119.9	90.1	98,300	6	3	4	4	5	6
7	Dallas-Fort Worth	248	62.1	42.1	40,100	7	8	8	10	8	5
8	Houston	235	86.5	66.7	62,300	10	7	7	7	6	3
9	Denver	195	43.6	47.1	53,100	8	12	11	11	4	7
10	Boston	176	46.7	60.1	22,600	13	10	10	12	13	11
11	Phoenix	165	26.9	31.7	25,300	12	9	13	17	20	22
12	Philadelphia	158	33.0	28.2	19,800	9	11	15	14	24	17
13	Seattle	149	30.1	23.7	14,000	14	17	16	16	14	10
14	Riverside, Calif.	127	12.4	19.8	4,300	22	24	9			24
15	Minneapolis-St. Paul	122	41.8	55.8	47,000	16	14	14	13	11	8
16	Charlotte	95	16.2	12.0	10,300	11	14	17	18	22	18
17	San Diego	92	16.3	22.2	6,700	15	15	19	20	17
18	Miami	90	19.3	19.3	15,600	18	18	18	21	19	23
19	Sacramento	89	13.2	20.8	7,100	17	20	12	8	16	21
20	Virginia Beach	81	7.4	4.5	3,500		25
21	Detroit	80	14.0	12.0	12,100	23	19	20	9	15	14
22	San Jose	70	7.8	10.5	3,000	20	16	21	22
23	Austin	65	10.7	10.2	7,300				18	18	13
23	Portland, Ore.	65	11.2	8.1	5,100	24	23	23	15	12	18
24	Louisville	59	5.0	3.0	2,800	25				25
24	Tampa	59	12.4	13.7	11,500			22
25	Salt Lake City	55	6.1	6.3	4,500			24

Source: EPA

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About the Author

Elisa Wood | Editor-in-Chief

Elisa Wood is an award-winning writer and editor who specializes in the energy industry. She is chief editor and co-founder of Microgrid Knowledge and serves as co-host of the publication’s popular conference series. She also co-founded RealEnergyWriters.com, where she continues to lead a team of energy writers who produce content for energy companies and advocacy organizations.

She has been writing about energy for more than two decades and is published widely. Her work can be found in prominent energy business journals as well as mainstream publications. She has been quoted by NPR, the Wall Street Journal and other notable media outlets.

“For an especially readable voice in the industry, the most consistent interpreter across these years has been the energy journalist Elisa Wood, whose Microgrid Knowledge (and conference) has aggregated more stories better than any other feed of its time,” wrote Malcolm McCullough, in the book, Downtime on the Microgrid, published by MIT Press in 2020.

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