DC energy benchmarking, filed properly and on time.

If your building is on the DOEE covered building list, you owe an annual energy and water benchmarking report. We collect the utility data, build the Portfolio Manager record, and file it.

Dates and thresholds change. We confirm the current requirement for your specific building before anyone acts on it.

What benchmarking is, and what it is not.

Benchmarking is a measurement exercise. Once a year you report how much energy and water the whole building used, along with its square footage and how the space is used, and the District publishes the result. It does not, by itself, require you to change anything about the building.

What it does do is set the number everything else runs on. Your ENERGY STAR score, your BEPS position, your standing with lenders and appraisers, all of it comes out of the data you file here. A benchmarking report filed with the wrong square footage or a missing meter quietly becomes a compliance problem two years later.

That is the part we care about. Getting the filing in is the easy half. Getting the underlying record right, every meter, the correct gross floor area, tenant spaces treated consistently, is what protects the building later.

Non-filing is a fine, but the real cost is the record.

DOEE enforces benchmarking through notices and fines, and the amounts are not the part that hurts. The part that hurts is arriving at a BEPS evaluation year with no clean data history, no defensible square footage, and no time left to do anything about the score.

If you have already received a notice, do not panic and do not ignore it. Send it to us. Most of what looks alarming in that letter is procedural, and several of the buildings we get called about turn out not to have been covered at all.

What a DOEE letter usually means.

Most DC correspondence is one of two things, and neither is a bill.

Send us the letter itself, not a summary. We read it for the six things that decide the response: who sent it, which building and identifier it names, what period it covers, what it says you failed to do, the cure date, and whether it is a first notice or an escalation. We never quote a running penalty total, and we cure first, then talk to the regulator.