[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
FEDERAL LEADERSHIP BY EXAMPLE IN ENERGY CONSERVATION - NO COST QUICK
AND EASY STEPS FOR IMMEDIATE RESULTS
=======================================================================
(110-62)
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, PUBLIC BUILDINGS AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON
TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JULY 19, 2007
__________
Printed for the use of the
Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure
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COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE
JAMES L. OBERSTAR, Minnesota, Chairman
NICK J. RAHALL, II, West Virginia JOHN L. MICA, Florida
PETER A. DeFAZIO, Oregon DON YOUNG, Alaska
JERRY F. COSTELLO, Illinois THOMAS E. PETRI, Wisconsin
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina
Columbia JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee
JERROLD NADLER, New York WAYNE T. GILCHREST, Maryland
CORRINE BROWN, Florida VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan
BOB FILNER, California STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio
EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas RICHARD H. BAKER, Louisiana
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi FRANK A. LoBIONDO, New Jersey
ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland JERRY MORAN, Kansas
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California GARY G. MILLER, California
LEONARD L. BOSWELL, Iowa ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
TIM HOLDEN, Pennsylvania HENRY E. BROWN, Jr., South
BRIAN BAIRD, Washington Carolina
RICK LARSEN, Washington TIMOTHY V. JOHNSON, Illinois
MICHAEL E. CAPUANO, Massachusetts TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania
JULIA CARSON, Indiana SAM GRAVES, Missouri
TIMOTHY H. BISHOP, New York BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania
MICHAEL H. MICHAUD, Maine JOHN BOOZMAN, Arkansas
BRIAN HIGGINS, New York SHELLEY MOORE CAPITO, West
RUSS CARNAHAN, Missouri Virginia
JOHN T. SALAZAR, Colorado JIM GERLACH, Pennsylvania
GRACE F. NAPOLITANO, California MARIO DIAZ-BALART, Florida
DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania
DORIS O. MATSUI, California TED POE, Texas
NICK LAMPSON, Texas DAVID G. REICHERT, Washington
ZACHARY T. SPACE, Ohio CONNIE MACK, Florida
MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii JOHN R. `RANDY' KUHL, Jr., New
BRUCE L. BRALEY, Iowa York
JASON ALTMIRE, Pennsylvania LYNN A WESTMORELAND, Georgia
TIMOTHY J. WALZ, Minnesota CHARLES W. BOUSTANY, Jr.,
HEATH SHULER, North Carolina Louisiana
MICHAEL A. ACURI, New York JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio
HARRY E. MITCHELL, Arizona CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan
CHRISTOPHER P. CARNEY, Pennsylvania THELMA D. DRAKE, Virginia
JOHN J. HALL, New York MARY FALLIN, Oklahoma
STEVE KAGEN, Wisconsin VERN BUCHANAN, Florida
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee
JERRY McNERNEY, California
VACANCY
(ii)
Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and Emergency
Management
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of Columbia, Chairwoman
MICHAEL H. MICHAUD, Maine SAM GRAVES, Missouri
JASON ALTMIRE, Pennsylvania BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania
MICHAEL A. ARCURI, New York SHELLEY MOORE CAPITO, West
CHRISTOPHER P. CARNEY, Pennsylvania Virginia
TIMOTHY J. WALZ, Minnesota CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee JOHN R. `RANDY' KUHL, Jr., New
JAMES L. OBERSTAR, Minnesota York
(Ex Officio) JOHN L. MICA, Florida
(Ex Officio)
(iii)
CONTENTS
Page
Summary of Subject Matter........................................ vi
TESTIMONY
Grone, Phil, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, Installations and
Environment, Department of Defense............................. 8
Lipinski, Hon. Dan, a Representative in Congress from the State
of Illinois.................................................... 4
Stanley, Neil, Chief of Staff/Acting Associate Director of
Energy, District of Columbia Department of the Environment..... 8
Walraven, Brenna S., RPA, CPM, Chairman-Elect, Building Owners
and Managers Association International......................... 8
Winstead, David L., Commissioner, Public Buildings Service, U.S.
General Services Administration................................ 8
PREPARED STATEMENT SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Matsui, Hon. Doris O., of California............................. 47
PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED BY WITNESSES
Grone, Philip W.................................................. 49
Walraven, Brenna................................................. 60
Winstead, David L................................................ 73
SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD
Grone, Phil, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, Installations and
Environment, Department of Defense:
Response to question from Rep. Norton.......................... 30
Response to question from Rep. Norton.......................... 36
Response to question from Rep. Norton.......................... 38
Response to question from Rep. Norton.......................... 42
Response to question from Rep. Norton.......................... 44
Walraven, Brenna S., RPA, CPM, Chairman-Elect, Building Owners
and Managers Association International, slide displays on
Energy Star.................................................... 71
Winstead, David L., Commissioner, Public Buildings Service, U.S.
General Services Administration, Memorandum for Assistant
Regional Administratiors, PBS, on Presidential Directive on
Energy and Fuel Conservation by Federal Agencies............... 91
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
HEARING ON FEDERAL LEADERSHIP BY EXAMPLE ON ENERGY CONSERVATION: NO
COST QUICK AND EASY STEPS FOR IMMEDIATE RESULTS
----------
Thursday, July 19, 2007
House of Representatives,
Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure,
Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings and
Emergency Management,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:10 a.m., in
Room 2167, Rayburn House Office Building, the Honorable Eleanor
Holmes Norton [Chairman of the Subcommittee] presiding.
Ms. Norton. The Subcommittee will come to order.
You will notice I delayed starting the Subcommittee hearing
until we let the sunlight in. This is a Subcommittee hearing on
energy conservation. It is focusing on ways to conserve before
our very eyes.
Before our eyes is the natural sunlight except that in
every Committee room in the House of Representatives, we block
out the sun and depend upon these lights. I have asked that
these lights be turned down and that we rely on natural
sunlight to the extent possible.
I am also seeking to experiment to see whether the camera
which records our hearings can see with the natural sunlight,
the way we do when we watch television. We sit in our offices
and watch television. I don't see anybody turning off the
lights. Television comes into our house, and it doesn't say we
can't record you unless you turn out the sunlight. In fact,
they tell us sometimes to come out into the sunlight.
We are trying to begin by practicing what we preach,
particularly since this is a hearing on Federal Leadership by
Example on Energy Conservation: No Cost Quick and Easy Steps
for Immediate Results.
I am pleased to welcome our panel and others who are here
today for this first in a series of hearings that could be
entitled Greening the Federal Sector. We have selected a
somewhat more serious and descriptive title that I have just
indicated.
The title reflects our impatience with this Country's pace
in confronting the national and international energy crisis
that is proceeding at a breathtaking pace while the world
stares with open mouths. Yet, we already know of uncomplicated
ways to proceed that will cost little or nothing while
producing big dividends in energy savings including gas,
electricity, oil, air conditioning, water and all the rest. We
begin a more aggressive pursuit of these methods today.
According to a September, 2006, Department of Energy
report, the public and private building sector together account
for an amazing 39 percent of total U.S. energy consumption,
more than both the transportation and industry sectors.
Even more surprising, public and private sector buildings
like those under our Committee-Subcommittee jurisdiction are
responsible for 71 percent of U.S. electricity consumption.
These buildings in the United States alone account for 9.8
percent of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.
U.S. buildings are responsible for nearly the same amount
of carbon emissions as all sectors of the economies of Japan,
France and the United Kingdom combined. The Federal Government
is the world's single largest energy consumer and the more
prolific in wasting energy in the world today.
Yet, for years, our Government has pursued and achieved
energy savings that demonstrate that we are capable of moving
with far greater results. Primary energy use by the Federal
Government, for example, fell by 13 percent during the past 20
years with a 25 percent decrease in energy costs in real terms
despite a 27 percent increase in fuel prices in the U.S. in
2005. We will learn today how these results were achieved and
how to build on them.
The first obligation of Congress in achieving energy
savings is not big spending on energy technology but moving in
earnest to conservation measures, many of which exist on paper
right now, on Federal paper right now, and providing the
appropriate incentives and authority to enforce these measures.
Both common sense and Federal budget constraints require a
focus first on energy conservation methods at home where we
live, where we work.
This Subcommittee has jurisdiction over General Services
Administration activities and programs as the property manager
for the Federal Government.
GSA itself owns 1,500 Federal buildings comprising over 175
million square feet of space. The Agency leases another 7,100
buildings with a total rentable area of over 176 million square
feet of space. Because GSA is a leaseholder for the vast
majority of office space controlled by the Federal Government,
that Agency also can play a pivotal in energy conservation for
the private sector as well.
The Department of Defense also owns and manages a huge
portfolio of real estate assets including military housing,
military bases, maintenance and operation centers, community
facilities, hospitals, troop mess and housing facilities and on
and on.
DOD real estate assets amount to just over 2 billion square
feet of space with a replacement value of $653 billion.
Although our Subcommittee does not have jurisdiction over
DOD facilities, we hope that what we develop in no and low cost
energy savings ideas and methods of enforcement will help
upgrade DOD approaches and implementation as well.
Federal energy savings between 1983 and 2005 demonstrated
that the Federal Government is moving in the right direction.
The most important need today is to quicken the pace of
conservation and savings and put teeth in what is being done.
Executive Order 13423 already requires a 3 percent reduction in
energy use intensity annually and a 2 percent annual water
reduction intensity. There is evidence that these and other
targets are being met, but there is little infrastructure,
authority and accountability.
Most of the Federal opportunities for energy conservation
and savings are familiar and small, but together they have
large potential in the hands of a major real estate owner and
manager like the Federal Government: turning off non-essential
lights in office space after certain hours, powering down
printers, computers and copy machines, avoiding running large
machines during peak hours, buying ENERGY STAR products and
fluorescent light bulbs and many, many other easy energy saving
steps. These simple no cost or inexpensive measures provide
immediate savings with little or no added capital cost.
Some States have taken admirable leadership in energy
conservation policy. Utah's Energy Savings in State Buildings
Act requires the Utah Division of Facilities, Construction and
Management to develop incentives to encourage State entities to
conserve energy and reduce energy costs.
Virginia requires agencies to pursue energy savings
activities whose costs are recoverable in one fiscal year.
Among Nevada's most interesting energy approaches is the
requirement to implement short term measures that require only
consistent procedural changes and daily habit modification and
another requiring short term measures which can be implemented
by State agencies within the present fiscal year to reduce or
limit energy usage and plan for energy conservation without new
legislation and within existing budget constraints.
To do our part as perhaps the largest office space holder
in the world and to become a leader in the field of office
space energy conservation, we will need to codify what
precisely is expected of agencies and of personnel who will be
held responsible.
In addition, for the first time, we who serve on this
Subcommittee will have a formidable responsibility ourselves to
engage in rigorous oversight of energy use and conservation in
the Federal sector as if our lives depended on it. As a matter
of fact, the life of the planet does.
I am pleased now to hear from our Ranking Member in
substitution but please to have her in fact, Mrs. Capito.
Mrs. Capito. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair, for holding
today's hearing on energy conservation, and I appreciate the
opportunity to hear witnesses talk about simple, yet effective,
steps we can take to reduce our energy usage and reduce
taxpayer dollars.
I would like to welcome our colleague and our Committee
Member, Mr. Dan Lipinski. I know you have a strong interest in
this matter, and I look forward to hearing your statement.
We will also be hearing from some other experts who can
help us find those quick, cost-free and efficient ways to save
energy in all of our Government buildings.
To put this in perspective, I think the Chairwoman has
alluded to many of the statistics, but the buildings in this
Country consume--I didn't realize this--40 percent of the total
energy in the United States and 70 percent of the electricity.
We will hear about how even small reductions in the energy
consumed by these buildings can have a large cumulative effect.
You mentioned turning out the lights at night. It does
always amaze me, being brought up in a house where you were
supposed to turn the light out of every room every time you
leave, and when you leave at night these buildings many times
are lit up. You can even see the TVs going in the windows, and
the lights are on as well. I think we need to all be cognizant
of at what cost we are doing this.
I hope our witnesses can discuss how these initiatives can
be combined with comprehensive energy savings strategies for
specific buildings and building complexes. GSA, in particular,
its mission is to help its client agencies meet their
environmental obligations. GSA has made significant investments
in energy saving solutions and has achieved a 30 percent
reduction in energy consumption by the Energy Policy Act of
1992.
In the past, GSA was eager to demonstrate energy
conservation and acquired the services of Pepco Energy Services
to serve as a general contractor and project manager of the
GSA's new photovoltaic system. This solar generating
electricity provides power for the central cooling plant at the
Suitland Federal Center. I hope we can hear a little bit more
about that.
The Defense Department has also sought Pepco's advice when
it had to cut greenhouse emissions by 30 percent in the
military district of Washington. The DOD was advised to change
lighting fixtures, install cold climate windows and retrofit
the cooling system among other things. These small but
important changes amounted to over 200 million in energy
savings over the contract term.
I hope our witnesses will address the comprehensive energy
savings procedures and, with their advice, one day we hope to
be able to obtain a cleaner and more efficient Federal
Government.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses and thank you
again, Madam Chair, for this hearing.
Ms. Norton. Thank you, Mrs. Capito.
Mr. Arcuri, do you have an opening statement?
Mr. Arcuri. No ma'am.
Ms. Norton. We are going to go to our first witness, and we
are pleased to welcome Congressman Lipinski, especially pleased
since he earlier came forward with a bill which we have already
incorporated in the pending bill from this Committee on energy.
I am pleased to welcome you here and hear your testimony,
Mr. Lipinski.
TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE DAN LIPINSKI, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and thank you
for letting the light in.
I said earlier when we had a hearing, and you had mentioned
about how we have these curtains blocking all the light, that
it took me a while before I even knew that there were windows
behind these curtains in a lot of these Committee rooms. Thank
you for doing that.
Chairwoman Norton, Mrs. Capito, Mr. Arcuri, today,
Americans are rightly concerned about the impact of foreign
energy dependence on our national security and the effects of
global climate change on the planet. I applaud Chairwoman
Norton for holding this hearing because I firmly believe that
the Government must lead by example, but when it comes to
energy conservation, the Federal Government because of its size
also has a significant direct impact on energy usage and the
environment.
That is why earlier this year, my colleague, Bob Inglis and
I introduced the Bulb Replacement in Government with High
Efficiency Technology Energy Savings Act known as the BRIGHT
Energy Savings Act. This bill will help us to address both
environmental and energy issues by cutting down significantly
on energy usage and emissions of global warming gases by the
Federal Government while at the same time saving millions of
taxpayer dollars. It is a win for the environment, a win for
national security and a win for American taxpayers.
Our legislation directs the General Services Administration
to replace currently used low efficiency light bulbs with high
efficiency bulbs whenever a bulb is replaced or installed in a
Federal GSA building.
The impact of the BRIGHT Energy Savings Act could be
significant. The Chairwoman discussed the number and size of
buildings that GSA owns and also manages. Our figures show at
least three million lights throughout the Federal Government
could be upgraded to high efficiency bulbs under our
legislation.
The type of high efficiency bulb that will mostly likely be
used today is the ENERGY STAR certificated compact fluorescent
light bulb known as a CFL. CFLs use approximately 75 percent
less energy than incandescent bulbs, provide the same amount of
light, and they last approximately 8 to 10 times longer.
Replacing an ordinary bulb with a comparable CFL saves up to
$74 in energy costs over the bulb's lifetime.
It is easy to see that hundreds of millions of taxpayer
dollars can be saved, implementing this bill. By converting
just one conventional 60 watt incandescent bulb to a 13 watt
CFL of the same brightness, we can prevent the burning of 110
pounds of coal and the release of 450 pounds of climate
changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
If the Federal Government makes this action and it leads
every American household to just swap one bulb for a CFL, the
Country would save $8 billion in energy costs, prevent the
burning of 30 billion pounds of coal and keep 2 million cars
worth of greenhouse gas emissions from entering the atmosphere.
That is just one bulb in every home, and every home has about
30 light bulbs. The possibilities are great.
Ms. Norton. Speak more closely into your microphone like I
am.
Mr. Lipinski. All right.
Ms. Norton. This room is so cavernous that it is easy for
your voice to get lost.
Mr. Lipinski. As an engineer by training, I am fascinated
by the promise of new and emerging technologies and what they
mean for our future. In addition to CFLs, new halogen
technologies are expected to become commercially available
later this year. Further down the road, LEDs, light-emitting
diodes, will revolutionize the lighting industry leading to
vastly more efficient lighting and the prospects of bulbs that
do not burn out.
Much of this technology represents American ingenuity and
innovation. It provides hope for a brighter future. With the
Federal Government purchasing large quantities of these high
efficiency bulbs, this next generation of technology will be
less costly to put into American homes.
I am pleased that a bipartisan group of more than 80
Members have joined us on the BRIGHT Energy Savings Act. Just
last month, the language of this bill was adopted into the
Committee's Transportation Energy Security and Climate Change
Mitigation Act. Now we need to move this important legislation
from this Committee forward.
In addition, Representative Bob Inglis, Ed Markey, and Mark
Kirk join me in amending the fiscal year 2008 Defense
Authorization Bill with similar language requiring the DOD to
use energy efficient lighting to the fullest extent deemed
feasible.
Finally, Representative Inglis and I have worked with
Representative Jane Harman and Fred Upton to amend every House
appropriations bill that comes to the floor this year with
similar language requiring the use of high efficiency bulbs.
Combined, all these efforts will apply a high efficiency
lighting requirement on virtually every Federal agency and
facility. This is a practical, common sense approach that is
simply the right thing to do.
I applaud Speaker Pelosi and Chairman Oberstar for their
efforts to make Congress a model for the Country and for the
world.
I would also like to thank Chairwoman Norton for working
with me on this important issue and allowing me to testify
today.
It is rare when we are talking about saving energy,
becoming more energy independent, cutting down on global
warming gases. It is rare when we can do these things and at
the same time save money. It is just common sense that the
Federal Government lead in replacing our low efficiency
incandescent bulbs with high efficiency bulbs. We can do much
in saving energy, helping the environment and also saving
taxpayer dollars.
Thank you.
Ms. Norton. Well, thank you, Mr. Lipinski, and especially
thank you for your leadership.
It should be said that some of what needs to be done with
respect to fluorescent lighting we see all around us, and much
of that is being done by GSA in buildings, perhaps not in
lamps. But in that regard, we hear complaints that incandescent
lamps or incandescent bulbs are less expensive than fluorescent
bulbs, and we live in a short term first Country.
Why is that, number one and, two, are the prices coming
down for the bulbs as far as you know?
Mr. Lipinski. Well, the incandescent bulbs are based on
technology that was more than a hundred years ago created. We
are still putting electricity through a filament to create that
light but more than anything, create heat more than light.
Those are very cheap to produce, and that is very true. You
walk in the store. Sometimes you can find four of those bulbs
for a dollar. But in the long run, yes, right now the CFLs last
8 to 10 times longer and the energy savings, 75 percent less
energy.
Ms. Norton. What is the short term?
This energy savings point has got to get across. You can
tell people that something will save you money. If you tell
them it will save you money over the next year, you might get
them, or if you tell them it will save you money in two years.
But unless you speak time frames, I think the short term fix in
the American brain may not catch even though I believe it is
catching on in the Federal sector.
Mr. Lipinski. Well, I think it is hard to say. It depends
on how much you are using your light bulbs because the
estimates are that up to $74 over the lifetime of a bulb will
be saved by using a CFL rather than an incandescent. So it all
depends on how long your light bulbs are lasting right now, how
much you are using them, how much that you could save in one
year.
Ms. Norton. I can see the difficulty.
Mr. Lipinski. It is really difficult to say, but most
estimates are that within a year you will come out ahead from
the energy savings for using a CFL rather than an incandescent
bulb.
Ms. Norton. I think the Federal Government does understand
it to the extent that bulbs are used as opposed to fluorescent
lights. This needs to be mandatory. It is not mandatory now. It
will be when the provision in your bill is added to our energy
bill.
I would like to ask Mrs. Capito if she has any questions
for Mr. Lipinski.
Mrs. Capito. No, I have no question. Thank you for your
efforts. I look forward to working together to find some
solutions, and I am interested in your talking about using the
different bulbs.
I just have one question. Is the bulb that you are talking
about the spiral?
Mr. Lipinski. Yes. Actually, I should have brought an
example. It is the spiral bulb. These are fluorescent lights,
but they are in the tubes, but there are also the ones that are
spiral and screw into a regular light socket.
They also have ones that now actually look more. They put
something around that spiral so it looks like a regular
incandescent bulb.
The other thing is that some people say they don't like the
bulbs because of the type of light that they give off. There
have been great advances made in CFLs in terms of producing
light that is very much like an incandescent bulb that we are
used to.
In addition to that, these halogen bulbs, these new halogen
bulbs, they are a little different than the ones that we use in
some appliances now. There will be screw-in halogen bulbs
coming out later this year. Virtually, you cannot tell the
difference between that and an incandescent bulb, and they are
still more efficient than incandescent bulbs.
Ms. Norton. Most of the bulbs you are talking about are
screw-in bulbs and you can put them in a lamp?
Mr. Lipinski. Yes.
Ms. Norton. In any lamp in your house or any lamp here in
the Congress.
Mr. Arcuri.
Mr. Arcuri. Thank you, Madam Chair.
I would just like to thank the gentleman for his hard work
in this area and his leadership. Thank you very much. Keep it
up. This is what we need to be talking about. This is the
direction that we need to continue to move in, and I appreciate
your efforts.
Thank you.
Mr. Lipinski. Thank you.
Ms. Norton. If there are no other questions, we thank you
for coming, Mr. Lipinski.
If I may say so, the interesting thing is we began with Mr.
Lipinski and Mr. Lipinski's idea which is already part of our
statute, but what we are today about are things that don't even
cost that much, don't even cost as much as the added cost of
the fluorescent light bulbs.
I very much appreciate your coming. I appreciate your
initiative.
I want to ask the next panel to step forward. We are going
to hear next from Commissioner David Winstead of the Public
Building Service at GSA, from Phil Grone, the Deputy
Undersecretary of Defense for Installations and Environment,
from Brenna Walraven who is Chairman-Elect of the Building
Owners and Managers Association International and Neil Stanley
who is Chief of Staff/Associate Director of Energy Conservation
in the District of Columbia which has taken some important
path-breaking steps at the local level.
Let us begin with Mr. Winstead.
TESTIMONY OF DAVID L. WINSTEAD, COMMISSIONER, PUBLIC BUILDINGS
SERVICE, U.S. GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION; PHIL GRONE,
DEPUTY UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE, INSTALLATIONS AND
ENVIRONMENT, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE; BRENNA S. WALRAVEN, RPA,
CPM, CHAIRMAN-ELECT, BUILDING OWNERS AND MANAGERS ASSOCIATION
INTERNATIONAL; NEIL STANLEY, CHIEF OF STAFF/ACTING ASSOCIATE
DIRECTOR OF ENERGY, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA DEPARTMENT OF THE
ENVIRONMENT
Mr. Winstead. Chairwoman Norton, Congressman Arcuri and
Congresswoman Capito, it is very nice to be here. I am very
pleased as Commissioner of the Public Buildings Service to join
this hearing and your commitment to energy conservation in the
built environment.
I would like to ask that my formal statement be submitted
for the record as well as some handouts and charts that I have
for the Committee's attention.
Today, I would like to focus on four general areas,
responding to some of the questions that we have had for
Congressman Lipinski. I wanted to stress GSA's recent history
in terms of energy savings in our 1,500 Federal buildings and
our leased inventory; number two, our building operations and
customer outreach efforts to our tenants for energy
conservation actions; three, efficient building systems and
renovation, new construction. As you know, we have a very large
construction and renovation program through the Chief
Architect's Office at GSA as well; and, fourth, utility
procurement actions.
I would like to also offer a few ideas that might assist
the Subcommittee in further promoting cost-effective energy
strategies in Federal facilities.
Here today, I have Pat Fee who is Director of Energy of
Building Operation and Maintenance, also Kevin Kampschroer who
is Director of Research and Expert Services that really is our
in-house expert on energy and sustainability issues.
As the Chairwoman mentioned, Federal buildings account for
30 percent of Government energy use. As much as 70 percent of
that cost is electricity. Leading by example and demonstrating
how we can reduce energy consumption through operation,
customer outreach and effective buildings and cost-effective
utility procurement is an extremely important and very well
staffed out program at GSA at this point.
We feel we have a very strong record of energy
conservation. This goes back to 1985 even and 2005. We have
achieved about a 30 percent reduction in energy which we
targeted by the Energy Policy Act.
We have made great strides in implementing the President's
executive order which requires a 30 percent reduction from 2003
through 2015. In fact, in 2006, fiscal year 2006, we reduced
our overall energy consumption in our owned inventory by about
4.7 percent compared to 3 years before.
We currently operate our buildings at 9 percent below the
private sector. BOMA, you will hear testify. We use the BOMA
benchmarks as well as other performance standards in the
marketplace to govern our actions and savings compared to other
private sector buildings. We also are paying on the average 4.2
percent less in terms of utility.
During the 1990s, Congressman Lipinski is certainly pushing
this forward with this bill, but we had retrofitted existing
buildings with increasingly efficient lighting systems. Our
early goal was to reach about 20 percent energy reduction
between 1985 and 2000. We are moving towards a new generation
of integrated lighting products including building-wide design
systems, task lighting in terms of ambient as well as desktop
lighting, and lighting controls and new glazing materials.
We are also increasingly managing the energy consumption in
our buildings more effectively, and the NCR is a great example
of this, and I will mention an action taken just two weeks ago
that illustrates that.
We have energy management practices, both energy tracking
where we track energy consumption monthly at all GSA
facilities. Our systems provide a status of energy trends as
relate to past and future activity, and we also target
opportunities for operating improvements in energy retrofits.
We also conduct energy audits continually on our building,
identifying both energy savings and life cycle, effective
energy conservation and on an annual basis, we tackle about 10
percent of our inventory with those audits.
Also, over the past 3 years, 33 of our buildings reduced
their energy consumption by more than 20 percent. We review
with our property managers at these locations their actions in
terms of energy reduction.
We use the ESPC which is Energy Saving Performance
Contracts. We are essentially a private business investing in
energy retrofitted buildings and from the savings of that
energy, we essentially can finance the improvements that are
being included in those energy retrofits. But some of these
have included turning off perimeter lighting, obviously office
equipment, also reducing the use of space heaters, eliminating
some non-essential 24 hour equipment operation and obviously
lighting retrofits.
In addition, we are increasingly adjusting lighting control
systems to match tenant needs and replacing interior and
exterior lights with the LEDs, as Congressman Lipinski
mentioned, the light-emitting diodes, and replacing gas engines
with electric motors.
Also tenant outreach is a large part of this, ensuring that
we can incentivize our Government employees to embark on a
number and we have done that in a number of ways. Our property
managers are essentially working through GSA energy
coordinators to implement aggressive energy actions for both
our buildings and our tenants. There are illustrations of this.
We do have one chart, I think, that illustrates that the
best, and that was that just two weeks ago we had 90 degree
days in Washington, and I think this will illustrate what, by
energy control systems in our buildings in NCR, we actually
were able to reduce. Even though the heat went up to 98 degrees
two weeks ago Tuesday, we were able to predict that and adjust
and dictate to the property managers within our NCR buildings
to reduce the energy levels to adjust for savings during times
that previously you may have had blackouts. So this is an
example just within the last two weeks of using those
monitoring systems.
I know that my time is almost up here, Madam Chair, but you
are well of our efforts with our owned inventory and the new
buildings in terms of the Bennett Building in Jacksonville, we
are saving about a 60 percent reduction as a result of
integrating energy efficient design; the Duncan Building in
Knoxville, Tennessee.
Also I think most notorious is last Monday, we dedicated
the new San Francisco Federal Building in San Francisco. From
the 5th to 18th floor, essentially, it is taking advantage of
the low humidity and the moderate temperatures in San
Francisco. It does not have heating or air conditioning
systems, and we hope to get about 50 percent reduction in that
portion of the building.
There are some secured sections of the building that have
regular HVAC systems, but we are essentially taking the wind
flows and the design of the building to maximize returns as a
result of the siting of that building.
Madam Chair, I know I am up here, but I think I covered
other examples of what we are doing, and I would be happy to
take any questions at the end of the panel.
Ms. Norton. Thank you, Mr. Winstead.
Mr. Grone.
Mr. Grone. Thank you, Madam Chair, and distinguished
Members of the Subcommittee. I appreciate this opportunity to
appear before you this morning to discuss the energy efficiency
and conservation programs of the Department of Defense.
Consistent with the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Executive
Order 13423, DOD strategy is a comprehensive approach to reduce
energy consumption, increase facility energy efficiency and
develop renewable energy resources.
In furtherance of that strategy in my role as the Deputy
Undersecretary of Defense for Installations and Environment, I
issued a memorandum on installation energy policy goals on
November 18th, 2005. Along with emphasizing the requirements of
current law and the goals of the executive order, the
memorandum established a goal for the Department to procure and
produce renewable energy equivalent to 25 percent of total
electricity demand by 2025 where life cycle cost effective.
The Department's program to this date is demonstrating
results. In fiscal year 2006, the Department reduced energy
consumption as measured in British thermal units per gross
square foot by 5.5 percent in buildings from the fiscal year
2003 baseline established by Congress.
DOD exceeded the fiscal year 2006 renewable energy goal of
2.5 percent. The Department's renewable purchases and
generation accounted for 9.5 percent of all electricity usage
in that year. The national average is approximately 6 percent.
DOD has achieved a 30 percent improvement in energy use
since 1985 when measured in terms of energy use per square foot
of building space. Over those 30 years, as I indicated, we have
reduced our energy use from 138 billion British thermal units
to 98 billion British thermal units per square foot today.
Our tools are critically important in this regard. We have
achieved significant savings using the Energy Conservation
Investment Program. That program, a line item that is contained
in the military construction appropriations request, is a
competitively bid that invests in energy efficient upgrades for
existing facilities.
In fiscal year 2007, that was a $55 million program which
included $19.6 million for renewable projects and just over $3
million in hydrogen fuel cell projects. In the President's
budget request for the coming fiscal year, we will increase the
amount for that program to 70 million.
The Department also makes use, as do our colleagues in GSA,
of Energy Savings Performance Contracts which allows us to use
industry funding to pay for equipment to reduce life cycle
costs of facilities and pay those investments back from the
accrued savings. Private sector financing through the ESPC
mechanism increased from 2005 by 316 percent to our present
position to more than $586 million of award value just in
fiscal year 2006.
We want to build on this progress by increasing the use of
ESPCs enabling DOD to have more effective, more cost-effective
long term facilities operation and maintenance, certainly at a
reduced up-front cost.
Installations and facilities are in the energy security
business for the long haul at defense installations, and we are
exploring additional enhanced use leasing opportunities and
public-private ventures to develop cost-effective renewable
resources.
But, certainly, we understand that the tools alone are not
enough and that the culture change which the Chair has
indicated that is necessary, the daily management by
individuals is critically important, and I want to highlight
three aspects of the training and emphasis that we have placed
upon that.
The Army has made energy stewardship a critical effort as
part of their broader Army Energy and Water Campaign Plan for
installations, and they have included energy and water
conservation responsibilities in the position descriptions and
performance plans of its commanders and civilian supervisors.
The Navy, realizing that creating this culture change is
vital to achieving energy efficiency, instituted a multilevel
plan for reaching its people through enhanced training. The
Navy's energy training program has directly facilitated the
training of 2,500 Department of Navy personnel with over 160
becoming certified energy managers.
The Air Force, under Secretary Wynne's leadership, in
establishing Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century,
included improving energy efficiency as one of AFSO 21's five
desired effects. The others being productivity, asset
availability, agility and safety, all of which are designed to
help guide initiatives in key areas for continuous process
improvement. Those who have been involved in continuous process
improvement know that it requires the direct, very direct role
of the individual on the ground to make sure that process
improvement occurs.
So across the Department in ways, large and small, from
training to major programs, we are working earnestly in this
area to improve our energy conservation profile. We have
appreciated the great support we have received from the
Congress for these initiatives, and we look forward to
continuing to work with Members to improve those programs in
the coming months and years.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Norton. Thank you, Mr. Grone.
Ms. Walraven.
Ms. Walraven. Good morning, Madam Chairwoman Norton and
distinguished Members of the Subcommittee. Thank you for
holding this important hearing and for inviting me to testify
today.
My name is Brenna Walraven. I am Executive Managing
Director of National Property Management for USAA Real Estate
Company, and I oversee property management operations for a
national portfolio of approximately 35 million square feet. I
also serve actually as Chairman-Elect for the Building Owners
and Managers Association International.
I am clearly having a technical problem.
Ms. Norton. We would just like you to speak. You can all
hear me. I don't know why it is.
Ms. Walraven. Am I not loud enough so go closer?
Ms. Norton. Yes, go closer, so we can really hear what you
are saying.
Ms. Walraven. Okay, I apologize.
I am also serving as Chairman-Elect for Building Owners and
Managers Association International, and I am testifying today
on behalf of BOMA. BOMA represents commercial real estate
professionals who collectively own or manage more than 9
billion square feet of office space which represents more than
80 percent of the prime office space in North America.
BOMA has a long involvement in energy efficiency issues,
and in fact last year we launched one of our most comprehensive
educational initiatives in partnership with the EPA's ENERGY
STAR program known as the BOMA Energy Efficiency Program or
BEEP. The BEEP curriculum is focused on no and low cost ways to
reduce energy consumption.
We estimate that if only 2,000 buildings adopt BEEP's no
and low cost practices over the next 3 years, energy
consumption and carbon emissions will be reduced by 10 percent
which would result in $400 million of energy savings and 6.6
billion pounds less carbon dioxide released into the
atmosphere. I was asked to address some of these strategies in
my remarks today.
First and foremost, we recommend that all real estate
owners and operators benchmark their buildings on ENERGY STAR
to get an energy performance rating that provides not only a
baseline but also, more importantly, provides a more objective
measure of energy performance because it takes into account
weather, occupancy and other building attributes that
dramatically affect consumption.
Next, we recommend creating an action plan on how to
improve the rating and thus performance by setting realistic
and achievable performance goals, identifying areas for
improvements and then focusing on operational strategy as well
as low and no cost improvements.
When setting priorities, we recommend first looking at the
low-hanging fruit beginning with operations and management,
then looking at occupant behavior, lighting controls and
finally short payback building retrofit opportunities. These
ideas are not at all complicated, and many do not require
additional expertise of the building manager or operators.
By low-hanging fruit, we mean start by looking at building
operations and management and regularly inspect all equipment
and controls to ensure they are operating as designed. For
example, calibrate thermostats and ensure thermostat settings
actually equal the space temperature. Make sure the system
isn't heating and cooling at the same time which can easily
happen.
Make sure systems that are supposed to be off at night
actually are off which can easily be verified by a once a month
evening inspection of the property because a simple $100 faulty
relay can cause a building to run 24 hours, 365 days without
anybody realizing it is happening.
Finally, implement janitorial best practices such as team
cleaning and day cleaning which can shorten the amount of time
space needs to be lit or air conditioned.
In terms of occupant behavior, it plays a critical role in
how facilities use energy. We recommend working with tenants to
educate them on ways that they can help to reduce energy by
simply turning off lights and unneeded equipment, switching to
ENERGY STAR office equipment and appliances, using task
lighting to reduce the need for unnecessary overhead lighting
and locating work stations as close to natural daylight as
possible to cut down on overall lighting needs.
Lighting specifically is another area where building
operators can achieve dramatic financial returns with low
capital investment and use off the shelf proven technologies.
Lighting actually accounts for approximately 29 percent of the
energy used in offices.
The latest technology often has a less than one year simple
payback. Change incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents and
convert 40 watt T-12 fluorescent lamps to 32 watt and even
today 25 watt T-5 lamps. Install electronic ballasts in place
of magnetic ballasts and replace inefficient exit signs with
LED exit signs.
Many parts of the building are often over-lit. In these
spaces reduce lighting levels, like we did here today, de-lamp
and disconnect unused ballasts. Timers and occupancy sensors
are also good ways to ensure that lights are only on when they
are actually needed. Many building managers find that they are
wasting energy.
In conclusion, there are many no and low cost energy
reduction measures that operators of public and private sector
buildings can take that improve the performance of the
building, improve energy efficiency and save money without at
all sacrificing comfort.
BOMA believes that the Building Owners and Managers
Association should continuously assess their energy usage using
the ENERGY STAR tools, strive to be responsible environmental
stewards as systems, technology and operating best practices
are continually improving.
We thank the Subcommittee for holding this important
hearing and look forward to working with Congress, the General
Services Administration, Department of Defense and other public
and private sector partners to achieve our mutual goal of
improving energy efficiency in the built environment.
Ms. Norton. Thank you for that testimony.
Mr. Stanley, I want to indicate how much I appreciate your
being here because you are here on shorter notice than the
others. We wanted to make sure that the local government or
State Government sector was represented here because we are
impressed that some of the more progressive actions are coming
from local and State governments.
Mr. Stanley, we welcome you and than you for coming.
Mr. Stanley. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Good morning
to you and Members of the Subcommittee on Economic Development,
Public Buildings and Emergency Management.
Again, my name is Neil Stanley, and I work as the Chief of
Staff for the District Department of the Environment. My
responsibilities at DDOE include managing all the District
Government energy efficiency and conservation programs. I
appreciate the opportunity to testify on implementing low to no
cost quick and easy energy efficiency measures.
I would like to take this opportunity to briefly describe a
number of key current and also prospective initiatives that the
District Government has designed to reduce energy consumption
in our facilities.
The first initiative is known as the D.C. Municipal
Aggregation Program or DCMAP. DCMAP is essentially a program in
which we conduct an online reverse auction for procuring
electricity.
Through this initiative, the D.C. Government is projected
to save over $30 million over the next 3 years while doubling
its environmental commitment by utilizing 10 percent of
renewable energy sources. These savings cover the District
Government buildings, our schools, the University of the
District of Columbia, the Washington Convention Center, The
D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission as well as our streets
and lights and traffic signals programs. Through aggregate
purchasing power, the District of Columbia is able to save and
reduce energy costs while promoting renewable strategies.
The second initiative that I think is very important for
energy conservation in the District of Columbia is the 2005
District of Columbia Green Building Act. The specific purpose
of this legislation was designed to create a task force of
green building experts, environmental advocates, government
representatives and industry experts to develop sustainable air
quality and stormwater management strategies to ensure the
District of Columbia is greening its buildings.
The legislation applies to new construction or substantial
improvement of District of Columbia buildings in the coming
fiscal year and includes the following requirements. The first
is that all non-residential buildings must fulfill or exceed
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards at the
silver level, that our public schools must also fulfill or
exceed the LEEDs for school standards and that priority
consideration will be given to District Government-owned spaces
with requirements meeting or exceeding the LEED silver
standard.
The District of Columbia will also be providing incentives
and grants to help defray the costs that will promote early
adoption of green building practices by applicants for building
construction permits for both residential as well as non-
residential buildings.
In addition to the Green Building Act, the District of
Columbia has become committed to developing high performance
buildings both in the government and commercial sectors. We are
doing that by adopting energy management strategies that
measure and improve energy performance through ENERGY STAR
benchmarking, reporting, training of building managers and
reducing consumption in all District Government facilities.
We are excited about this new opportunity, and we are also
excited about the opportunities that we have by serving on the
Building Code Advisory Council Energy Committee. Through our
service on this Committee, the District of Columbia is
promoting stronger energy standards in our building codes so
that new buildings coming online will be much more energy
efficient.
The District of Columbia is also working very diligently to
track and audit all of our government buildings and schools to
make sure that we are actively reducing the amount of energy
that we consume. Based on audit results, energy conservation
managers are being installed and building managers will be
trained so that they can help to maintain these buildings at a
lower consumption level.
Finally, the District of Columbia is also investigating the
feasibility of demands response options for District-owned
buildings. These programs will help to remove the District of
Columbia from the electricity grid and free up much needed
electricity during times of heavy electrical demand, thereby
preventing possible blackouts.
Madam Chair, we believe that the District of Columbia
Government can lead by example by decreasing energy
consumption, increasing our commitment to renewable strategies
and building or retrofitting buildings that meet LEED
standards. Although we have got a lot more work to do in
meeting this goal, we believe that our recent steps that we
have demonstrated show that the Nation's Capital is raising the
bar towards energy consumption standards.
This concludes my prepared remarks, and I am happy to
answer any questions that you may have.
Ms. Norton. I want to thank all four of you for testimony
that is not only enlightening but testimony that helps us to
understand how to get to the point where this is a matter of
requirement and where it is done more automatically as a matter
of habit. Some of your testimony has spoken to larger savings
and some of it to culture savings.
Let me begin first by noting that we have been joined by
the ultimate environmentalist on our Committee, the Chairman. I
ask Chairman Oberstar if he has a few remarks to make before we
proceed with questions.
Mr. Oberstar. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for calling
the hearing and for your persistent work on this issue.
I thank the gentlewoman from West Virginia, Mrs. Capito. I
always think of Moore Capito. I knew your father. I am happy to
say and sorry to say I have been around long enough to have
known the whole family.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Oberstar. Thank you for your participation and
steadfast participation in the Committee work.
The subject of this hearing is critical. We are going to
pursue a vigorous course of action on all public buildings
prospectuses from GSA, on life cycle costing, on energy
conservation practices.
We are going to require, as we have done in the six
building prospectuses reported this year, require a life cycle
cost analysis by GSA, a report on the benefit-cost analysis of
solar conservation whether it is photovoltaics or other solar
applications. We are going to do our part in energy
conservation.
The Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure has
jurisdiction over 367 million square feet of Federal civilian
office space. The annual electricity bill--it appalls people
when I tell them this--is $5,800,000,000. We can cut that 85 to
90 percent with solar applications, and we are going to do
that.
We are going to make sure that GSA does its part and save
the public money, stimulate the solar energy industry that has
on its own, without the Government has vigorous a partner as it
should have been over the last 30 years, has driven the cost of
photovoltaics down from $1.75 a kilowatt hour in 1977 to 25
cents a kilowatt hour today. We can drive that down further,
and we would have been farther along this path if the Congress
had persisted in overcoming President Reagan's abolishing of
the alternative energy program in 1981.
But we are where we are, and we are determined to do our
part in the greening of the Capital, in the greening of the
Nation. This does not require an Apollo project, I would say to
my colleagues. We don't need to have a crash program to invent
something new.
The whole space program runs on photovoltaics. The Forest
Service, the Park Service. NOAA has weather buoys that operate
on photovoltaic cells.
The U.S. Forest Service has monitoring stations in the
wilderness areas and in the national forests, reporting on
everything from precipitation to air temperature and moisture
content in anticipation and prevention of forest fires. The
Park Services has similar monitoring, all run by photovoltaics.
We can run these buildings by photovoltaics. We are going
to do it.
I will cease for the moment.
Ms. Norton. I don't know how the Chairman manages to know
so much about so many subjects. All you have to do is sit in
multiple Subcommittee hearings, and I just said to staff, I
think he must not read novels.
[Laughter.]
Ms. Norton. He spends his time knowing everything there is
about the subjects under our Committee.
We are mostly dealing with basics here. You have heard the
Chairman speak about where we could be with truly forward-
looking technology, and you heard him say we are where we are.
So let us begin with the basics.
What buildings have done, what the Defense Department has
done, what the District has done and what GSA has done is
impressive because we didn't know about it, because I think
most of the world thinks nothing is being done. I think we
would all agree that the time has probably come to quicken the
pace.
Let me ask you a basic question. Do you know what the
temperature is in the buildings under your jurisdiction as I
speak? Is there any mandate to what the temperature should be
in the buildings that you have any jurisdiction over?
Mr. Winstead. Madam Chair, we have in our P100 for our new
buildings, the systems that we put in actually do dictate
performance standards in terms of range of energy or rather
energy temperature.
In our current existing buildings in the NCR, we generally
leave it at about 70. It is 68 to 72 is the range that we
maintain most of the systems in NCR, most of our major Federal
buildings. So that is essentially the monitor. When we were
monitoring this building in the heat situations of two weeks
ago, we were still trying to keep it at the 72 level.
So that is essentially the benchmark that we have, and that
is reflected both in the building operation direction for our
property managers as well as with the design of new buildings
in the systems to try to keep it at the 68 to 72 range.
Ms. Norton. Mr. Grone?
Mr. Grone. Madam Chair, for the Department of Defense, we
have a similar range built into the operating procedures for
the 370,000 buildings that are in the DOD inventory. The
services implement that through their installation management
profiles.
We are in a similar position to GSA. We have established
corporate policy, department-wide policy in terms of guidance,
and then the components will implement that and execute that at
the base level, but it is a similar as Mr. Winstead described.
Ms. Norton. Did either of you? I know the buildings are not
under your specific control, Ms. Walraven.
Ms. Walraven. I would just add that as an industry standard
for commercial buildings, a range of 68 to 72 percent plus or
minus 2 percent, 2 degrees, is an industry standard, and most
leases dictate that range.
Mr. Stanley. The District of Columbia does not currently
have a mandate in place. However, we are convening an
interagency task force within the government to look at this
precise issue and using the leadership of both private industry
and the Federal Government as guidance for what the applicable
standards could be within the government.
Ms. Norton. I ask that question because what I think, well,
let me go to the next question.
It is pretty clear except for Mr. Grone's testimony, where
in a real sense you see the difference between how the military
sector and how the civilian usually operate. When the military
sector says you are supposed to do something, usually they say
and this is who is supposed to see that it gets done. You know
you are in the Army now or even in the military now.
I noted in your testimony. I think yours was the only
testimony where we heard specifics about who was delegated to
do something. I think we looked in your testimony and some of
what you said about the Army in particular, I remember. I don't
believe it was in your written testimony, but it seemed to be a
paradigm for how to make sure that a policy is more than a
policy.
Would you elaborate on how you carry out the policy or at
least how the Army has carried out the policy? Describe the
policy you spoke of because we really want to focus not nearly
so much on policy today--everybody knows what should be done--
but on how it should be carried out.
Mr. Grone. Well, Madam Chair, it is a very important
question because it gets to the heart of the matter about
performance measures and performance standards.
Ms. Norton. A little closer into the microphone.
Mr. Grone. It gets to the heart of the question about
performance measures and performance standards. We are not at
the department-wide level establishing policy as we have
previously, but the components as the Army has done and the
other components as well are building.
Ms. Norton. You went out and you used to do it department-
wide. Why did you go to Army, Navy, et cetera?
Mr. Grone. I am sorry?
Ms. Norton. You say you don't establish it department-wide
and you used to.
Mr. Grone. Oh, we do. We have department-wide goals that
are established. The components'--the Army, Navy, Marine Corps,
Air Force--defense agencies are responsible for the
implementation and execution and the achievement of those
goals.
Ms. Norton. I see.
Mr. Grone. But where the Department is evolving, as I think
many of our colleagues in our sister Federal agencies are
evolving, is building those performance expectations into not
just of the management plan of the organization but building it
into the performance standards and expectations for the command
leadership, for the senior executives as well as the line staff
that are implementing and carrying those out. So unifying what
we expect of our people, building them around programs that are
sustainable over time is critically important.
One of the things that we do in my office is we have
established a Defense Installations Strategic Plan. We are
revising it for the third time since it was first established
in 2004. It was the first occasion we had a Defense-wide
strategic plan for the management of the Installations'
portfolio and a key component of that plan concerns energy
demand management, generation of new and renewable sources and
how we cascade that again down to the level of the individual
person on the line, out in the field, how they would carry that
out.
The implementing guidelines, the change management
communication, these are all things that all of us in this
Federal agency are beginning to adopt, frankly, as many of our
colleagues in private industry do, linking large strategy
significant programs down to the individual.
Ms. Norton. The operative word for me was performance
measures. That is to say if, in fact, in judging the
performance of the Executive, energy conservation is included,
you are more likely to have energy conservation achieved.
Frankly, I wonder how the Federal Government achieved the
savings it did. I suspect that the savings that were in my
opening statement were not achieved by habits of workers or
managers but by purchases, bulk purchases and the like.
Mr. Winstead, for example, in Ms. Walraven's testimony, she
talks about janitorial best practices, and she says that
janitorial staff is often ignored when developing energy
savings. She has this astounding figure that they typically
account for 25 percent of weekly lighting use or 7 percent of
the total building use.
Now, one thing you could do in putting our your RPF for
janitors would be to incorporate performance standards for
them. Does anything like that occur in the many janitorial
contractors that are used by the Federal Government?
Mr. Winstead. Madam Chair, I think the comment by the
representative of BOMA is very much on target in your concern
in that regard. As you know we have and I mentioned in my
testimony, we have got energy coordinators in all the 11
regions, direct responsibility and accountability.
Ms. Norton. I don't understand what an energy coordinator
does or how that coordinator is incentivized or held
accountable otherwise.
Mr. Winstead. They are held accountable.
Ms. Norton. How?
Mr. Winstead. There is a quarterly performance review by
both the ARA and the region in terms of the operating,
basically the performance of the building with the energy
savings targets.
On the contract issues, there are clauses. For example, a
lot of our NCR buildings and major buildings and regions are
managed through a contract by NISH. I have talked to Bob
Chamberlain. He has annual conferences for training the
managers of the cleaning crews and maintenance crews, and we
are focused on that. We are going to be doing more with them to
ensure that every action is taken to obviously ensure lights
are turned out as quickly as cleaning is done in our buildings.
Ms. Norton. Would the RPF that you have to put out in order
to do janitorial services, which you do all over the Country,
is there or could there be points given for measures like
janitorial best practices? I am looking for incentives,
obviously.
Mr. Winstead. Right. We do have clauses of maintenance
contract and actually actions that are due. I will explore the
issue of whether we could incentivize and account for savings.
A lot of our buildings, as you well know, are multi-
tenanted. It is a little bit more difficult in terms of
figuring out what floor is being cleaned and whether lights
were turned out per direction through the contract to the
operation maintenance provider, but there may be more than we
are currently doing.
I would be happy to get the Committee a copy of the clauses
in that contract and what we are doing in training with NISH to
make sure that the contractors and the employees through NISH
are actually doing it. I would be happy to get that to you.
Ms. Norton. In the statutory authority we are
contemplating, we will be looking at what the Defense
Department has done. Some of that is impressive because there
are accountable people. We will be looking at incentives.
We had Ms. Walraven here at the same time we had our
government officials because the District of Columbia as well
as Federal agencies often rent space, lease space. It does seem
to me that there is a synergy there that is unavoidable. If you
have a lease from the Federal Government, you have got
something very valuable, and everybody knows it is very
competitive.
But I am not sure the extent to which that synergy works
out in best practices. What we are going to require in our
statute is best practices, and we are going to take those best
practices essentially from the kinds of things we heard that
the Defense Department is doing with performance measures and
from what the private sector is doing.
What I want to know is what kind of collaboration, given
the fact that you lease almost as much space as you own. I am
not sure if that is the case with the Defense Department, but I
ask you this question and Mr. Stanley this question as well.
Why isn't everybody in the same room, saying, hey, guess what,
this is what we are requiring of every Federal building
manager; therefore, this is required of you if you want this
contract, period?
We could change the world out there as well as the world
that we live in.
Mr. Winstead. Well, we do use. I mean Phil and I, in terms
of how we exchange best practices in this regard, we are on a
level.
Ms. Norton. What do you do? Tell me the nature of the
collaboration.
Mr. Winstead. Well, we work closely together in exchanging
best practices, and BOMA is obviously very much involved in
this. We have training with BOMA. We look at their standards in
terms of energy savings and operating techniques.
As I mentioned, in these clauses, our contract clauses,
both have facility standards in lighting control. These are for
the vendors that are operating the buildings. Mechanical and
engineering operation, there are contract clauses dealing with
that. So we do have within our contracts, requirements for our
contractors to take these actions and to control and turn off
lights and to save energy.
Ms. Norton. Suppose they don't do it. Do you know whether
they do it.
Mr. Winstead. Yes, we do.
Ms. Norton. I live in Washington, so I go downtown and I
see lights on all the time. It just kills me just because I
wonder. Like I said, I hope those people are working late, but
then I have my doubts.
I am not criticizing what you are doing. I am suggesting
that nothing happens automatically. As the Ranking Member said,
some of us were brought up so that you were supposed to turn
the light out when you leave the room, and it is still a habit
that you turn it out.
But that is not the case, I think, for the average
American, and if it is not the case for the average American
unless somebody is held responsible, we do not believe it will
happen.
My guess is that much of the savings, admirable savings
that have occurred have not occurred because of delegated
responsibility to make something happen but because of top
management's ways of buying energy and of bringing pressure at
that level on energy costs as opposed to bringing pressure also
at the level.
Now I could be wrong, but I haven't heard much about how
somebody is responsible, how somebody gets a bonus, how
somebody gets his performance rating affected except somewhat
from, of course, from the Department depending on which part of
the military we are talking about. So what we are looking for
is ideas rather than criticism.
I am going to go to Mrs. Capito and come back again after
she does some of her questions.
Mrs. Capito. Thank you, Madam Chair.
I have a question. I know that all the buildings that all
four of you deal with on a daily basis, a lot of them are very
old and poorly insulated, poorly lit maybe in some occasions,
maybe even poorly wired because of the age, using older
technologies or just the fact they are just plain worn out.
That has got to present really difficult challenges in terms of
energy conservation.
Mr. Winstead mentioned a new building. I believe you said
it was a new building that was being built in San Francisco.
That is a new construction, correct, and that holds such
promise, I think, for energy conservation. We know so much more
now about the technologies of conserving and balancing need
with down times and up times.
What kind of solutions have you worked on in terms of
meeting the challenges of older construction, older buildings
that you might be able to share not only with us but with
others in the group?
Mr. Winstead. Sure. Congresswoman Capito, as you mentioned,
a large part of our inventory is older buildings even though a
lot of the new courthouses, some 22 courthouses have been since
1995 basically.
A large part of what we are doing, we are investing about
$407 million if you look at the total renovation program from
1990 to 2007. In five buildings that we have analyzed that were
renovated with new systems, new efficient energy systems
between 2000 and 2003, we have seen an average reduction of
about 18 percent in consumption. The totals per building have
ranged from 3 percent to about 40 percent.
So what we have continued to do is to apply those new
systems that are available, whether they are HVAC systems or
new lighting systems we talked about earlier, into those
structures to get better performance out of them. A large part
in our three budget line items is obviously direct
appropriation for retrofit, but the R and A, renovation and
alteration, and the minor R and A projects that we have in
renovation is where a lot of that investment is occurring
through those line item programs.
What we have seen in our buildings, for example, in
Waltham, Massachusetts, where we have a storage facility for
NARA and their record-keeping is we have actually put a new
roof on the building which has a rubberized solar panel so the
entire roof is solar. It is not just a singular series of solar
panels. The reduction of energy, I think, from that
installation alone is in the neighborhood of 20 percent.
So that is the kind of actions that we are taking across as
well as building these new courthouses and new Federal office
buildings and the new border station, even the one we are now
underway with. A new border station in North Dakota has taken
advantage of the alignment of the building with sun and
basically the configuration of the heavy winds. The back side
of the building is beveled. Basically in the cold it will
divert these cold winds coming through that part. So we are
very active.
The one thing that I would mention to this Committee is at
a recent meeting of BOMA with the National Advisory Council
that I was present, GSA as a participant. I think part of what
incentivizes, and Chairman Oberstar alluded to this, what is
incentivizing the possibilities here now is the private sector
is finally really alive and engaged.
If you look back at the Green Building Council which has
biannual meetings, about four years ago, they were tracking
about 3,000 participants. This is both public and private
building owners and vendors of energy systems in buildings.
Now, 13,000 people are attending.
Obviously, the actions of the District and Montgomery
County and Arlington and NCR demanding LEEDs buildings and
recertification and renovation of buildings is really driving
better technology, better costs recovery and life cycle costs
of these facilities.
I would mention in my testimony just to show you the
payback period. It used to be 10 to 15 years ago, that we were
looking at 10 or 15 years payback on new HVAC systems or
lighting, new lighting or glazing of windows. Now we are
looking to an average of 6 years recovery for a lot of these
retrofitted energy systems that we are putting into buildings.
So we are seeing our payback shorten which is incentivizing
both our ability to renovate buildings as well as the public to
develop new technologies.
Mr. Grone. For the Department, certainly you hit on one of
the key points which is the age of the inventory. When I joined
the Department after leaving the House Armed Services Committee
in 2001, I took a look at the state of the inventory. The
average age of a building in the Department's inventory dated
to the Eisenhower Administration, and the average age of a
military family housing unit dated to the Truman
Administration. So we certainly had exactly the issue you
describe across the breadth of the portfolio.
Our approach is one coming out of the Office of the
Secretary of Defense that is very much a portfolio management
approach. What we have tried to do, what we are doing is
establishing broad performance expectations for the portfolio,
building models that are benchmarked to private sector and best
practices in the public sector that understand how we should be
maintaining and operating our assets, how we should think about
the recapitalization of those assets, aggressively demolishing
assets we no longer require, looking at those older assets for
their potential benefit as adaptive reuse.
What we find in many cases is that a well sustained older
facility has many of the attributes of energy conservation that
we are actually looking for. Carefully balancing within the
portfolio, what is the mission requirement to the asset and
bringing those up to some sense of contemporary standards, we
can get an enormous amount of efficiency.
But what we have not tried to do is specifically dictate a
military specification out of my office down to the components
to be implemented across the nearly 400,000 built assets to say
you can only do X with an installation.
We have tried to be very careful about performance
expectations, be specific with standards where they are
benchmarked to private sector practice, and then in working
with our private sector partners and our interagency partners
have those aggressively implemented across the enterprise.
Ms. Walraven. I wanted to specifically address on the
private sector side the financial impact is a huge motivator
and performance metric which is why our industry is keenly
focused on the impact of energy because it can be 20 percent of
total costs of operating a building and as much as a third of
variable costs or those costs which you can truly control.
In fact, I would also comment that as it relates to most
GSA leased structures, we are limited in our ability to
increase rent over CPI type of increases such that we have an
incentive to manage all costs but particularly energy because
it is such a huge component because we won't get that recovered
from the GSA. So that is in those leased environments that you
asked about, Madam Chair, is a way to address and make sure
that we are getting what the Federal Government expects.
I would also highlight that education and outreach is
absolutely key. To your point on this old buildings versus new
buildings, actually EIA, the Energy Information Association,
did a study--I believe it was in 2003--that looked at the
poorest performance buildings in the CBECS database which is
what ENERGY STAR is based on, and they also looked at the age
of those buildings.
What was interesting is that age was not the strongest
correlator for performance and, in fact, the bottom 25 percent
performers often had state of the art equipment including 76
percent had economizer systems, 56 percent had energy
management systems, 45 percent had variable speed drives.
So a big majority of these buildings had state of the art
equipment, and the age was not the biggest determinant which
really supported this point and which is where BOMA's energy
efficiency program or BEEP really focused on the low and no
cost ways to really improve performance because you can build a
LEED-certified top of the line building, but if you don't
operate it correctly and benchmark it on ENERGY STAR and really
manage that performance, it is not going to perform well.
We see in the GSA stuff that we deal with there is a
company at USAA that it is regularly part of the performance
that you will have an ENERGY STAR rating, that you will seek a
label, that you will LEED certify. I can assure you we are
living to live up to those standards.
Mr. Stanley. The District of Columbia Government has a
multi-prong strategy for addressing energy consumption in old
buildings. I think the highlight of our strategy is the Green
Buildings Act.
While a strong focus of the Green Buildings Act is on new
construction, there is a portion of the Green Buildings Act
that focuses on significantly renovated public buildings. By
that, I mean buildings that are owned and operated or receive a
significant portion of funding from the Government of the
District of Columbia, and so when there is an instance of
significant renovation in a D.C. Government building, starting
with the new fiscal year 2008, they will be required to meet
LEED standards.
This, I think, demonstrates strong leadership, quite
frankly nationally. We are very proud of that. We are also
working on making sure that there are strong incentives, not
just for government agencies but also for the private sector as
it relates to the Green Building Act moving forward.
The second, I think, piece of our multi-prong strategy is
conducting audits of all the government buildings that D.C.
owns and operates to do a baseline assessment of where we stand
right now with respect to energy consumption.
I think the follow-up to that is to do some retrofitting of
buildings that may not necessarily require a significant
renovation but probably could stand to use some retrofitting as
it relates to energy consumption. One of the aspects of that
may be working with private companies to come in and do some
retrofitting of some of the equipment and devices that exist in
buildings to enhance our energy consumption because we believe
that even a small investment can yield long term benefits with
respect to existing buildings.
Then the last piece of our multi-prong strategy is
training, and I think you have heard of that from a number of
my colleagues that are here on the panel as well. I think that
we want to make sure that every single facility manager within
the District of Columbia Government is properly trained in
basic strategies are making their buildings much more energy
efficient.
Some of them are very small things such as, again, making
sure that computers and lights are turned off. Others are
making sure that we have high performance cooling and heating
systems as well. The combination of those strategies, I think,
will help significantly.
Then I guess the final piece is also what I mentioned
before, and that is taking a look at some demand response
initiatives to make sure that during peak electricity demand
time such as during the summer that existing old buildings have
an opportunity to demonstrate reduced energy consumption as
well.
Mrs. Capito. I thank you all. I date back to the Eisenhower
era. I am glad to know age is not necessarily the prohibiting
factor to efficiency. I appreciate your insights.
I have to leave to go to another meeting.
I think the training aspect or the awareness aspect in this
Country, for some reason in the seventies this was a big push,
and I am sure a lot of you all were around. With Jimmy Carter,
we were in gas lines. We were becoming very aware of how much
energy we were using both as individuals and how much we were
using in our cars and our homes.
I remember at one point, actually when my dad was Governor
of the State of West Virginia, he turned off the lights.
Conservation was becoming a word that we all understood, and we
knew how to practice it. We got so far away from that.
I think if people realized the statistics that you have
just brought forward to us with the practices that you have in
place and that I am sure you are going to be increasing upon,
how much of an impact just small and low cost and real free
behavior modifications can make, it can really save us all in
the long run.
I hope that in conjunction with what you are doing--I think
you are doing a lot of great work--that just as a basic
citizenry, that we can, and I think we are, raise our awareness
and make all of us aware that little things go a long way. So I
appreciate everything.
Sorry, Madam Chair, I have to move out for an 11:30. It is
all your hands, very capable hands. Thanks for bringing the sun
in.
Ms. Norton. Thank you, Mrs. Capito.
Just a few more questions because we are trying to cross-
fertilize here between the military, our own civilian programs
and, of course, the private and public sectors.
In your testimony, Mr. Grone, you spoke about and you
indicated what is clear, that if you use energy saving
approaches, that will be a higher cost than if you use
conventional approaches if you are doing building. You do a lot
of building military housing, bases. I mean you do a huge
amount of building.
GSA does some, does less. We are just about to pass out an
appropriation, probably the largest in history for GSA to build
not just one building but a whole set of buildings on the old
St. Elizabeth's campus.
Now to what extent is our expectation that new methods of
construction, taking into account energy costs, to what extent
is that a pipedream because of the way in which appropriations
occur and the amount of money you have to build dictates
construction?
Are you able, in other words, to face the future as you get
opportunities to build new buildings of various kinds?
Mr. Winstead. Madam Chair, clearly, as I mentioned in my
testimony, the standards that we are putting in the P100. We
have revised the P100 standard to both comply with the EP Act
2005 and the executive order. It basically is including
requirements across the board that each building uses about 30
percent less energy, and that is published in the actual
standard so that we are actually going below the benchmarks. As
BOMA mentioned, most of our buildings are now benchmarked to
BOMA standards as well.
In the new construction, with the American Society of
Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning, we are actually,
in new materials and construction techniques and systems in
place, getting about 30 percent less energy in those new
buildings.
I know that you have watched.
Ms. Norton. You are able to take into account as you build
the new Coast Guard headquarters, that if you do X, you will
save the Government energy over, let us say, the next 10 years
rather than doing Y. You are able to do that?
Mr. Winstead. Yes, Madam Chair.
What I think we see in this chart that is in my testimony
about average new systems, be it materials like glazing or high
efficiency glass or lighting, what has happened now for the
first time is we are really seeing a matrix of return, the data
that allow us to understand what the Government is investing in
this. A decade ago investing in a green roof, you really
couldn't define to the degree that we can now. There is a lot
out there, and we are able to document returns.
What I am very pleased about is I mentioned earlier at this
very recent meeting through BOMA, this National Advisory
Council. They actually are looking at financial returns. As we
approach St. Elizabeth's and the new headquarters, we will be
able to actually understand what the return in energy savings
and to the taxpayer is for the new systems we put in that
headquarters building.
I know you are very interested. We spent a lot of public
money over the last 15 years on the courthouses, so we did a
little extra work. We looked. You know we have over 300
courthouses in our inventory. Over 50 have been built under
design excellence since 1992. We are actually seeing about 6
percent lower consumption in these courthouses.
Now, as you know, they are not as heavily populated. There
is not as much going on per day as a Federal office building, a
multi-tenanted Federal office building, and the atriums are not
consuming as much energy as public spaces. But we looking at
operating hours differential in the courthouses and we are
looking at the thermostat controls in the courtrooms that are
not being utilized in a day and turning them down. So we are
taking action with a lot of the newer buildings that have been
coming into our inventory.
Ms. Norton. Mr. Grone?
Mr. Grone. Madam Chair, the Department is in a position now
where we talk about the age of our facilities. We are in a
position now where we are undertaking a most significant
recapitalization of our military infrastructure since in the
last 50 years, taking account all of the construction
investments that are being made through base realignment and
closure activities, repositioning the force globally, growing
the Army and Marine Corps, the work that is being done with our
private sector partners in military housing privatization.
The budget that we have sent to the Congress for
consideration this year has roughly a $20 billion construction
program for fiscal year 2008. As we implement that construction
program, many of the attributes that Commissioner Winstead
discussed in terms of how we think about those assets, how they
ought to be designed for the future are things that we are
layering into that massive recapitalization activity of the
Department.
But there is one aspect of the energy conservation question
that we really haven't touched on which is for this Department
a critically important aspect of it. Our friends at GSA have
the benefit of managing largely singular assets that stand, in
many cases, alone, largely outside a secure fence in the
community, and they are largely responding to energy demand
reduction goals that occur within the four walls of that
singular asset.
The Department, obviously in managing military
installations, most of our assets are behind the fence in a
secure environment with very heavy energy demand pulls.
Ms. Norton. No, no. Let us not give you an advantage over
Mr. Winstead. You are on your own turf, setting your own terms.
Mr. Grone. It does with this exception. The aspect of the
problem that we haven't talked about is what happens outside
those four walls. We have a recapitalization plant value for
the entire enterprise of $710 billion based on our current
estimates. Our utility infrastructure alone is $69 billion and
within that $69 billion.
Ms. Norton. Do you provide your own utilities?
Mr. Grone. No. It is the plant replacement value of the
distribution systems on the installations. When the power comes
in at the main point of the fence at most installations, that
power distributes across the system. Much of that, we own
ourselves, and that plant value is about $25 billion for
electric power alone.
So as we look at the challenges of energy conservation for
this Department, it is not just what occurs inside the
building, but it is the distribution system that brings the
power to that building, modernized, efficient and effective.
When we looked at that challenge several years ago, there
was a Department of Navy sort of catch phrase that people would
use. The problem with our systems was that they squeak, they
leak and they are past their peak.
They are older, antiquated and need significant
modernization, and with that we are meeting our energy
conservation goals, but we also need to be very mindful of the
distribution systems and the feeder systems.
Also, frankly, up until just recently, we did not set about
when we built new construction. We are doing this now, but when
we did a new construction, we did not individually meter
buildings.
Ms. Norton. You did not what? I am sorry.
Mr. Grone. We did not individually meter buildings. So the
only place we had was the initial point of entry to tell us how
much power we were using at Fort Carson, but we had very great
difficulty understanding that on a per asset basis. We are
getting to that understanding now.
Ms. Norton. You are metering then all your buildings?
Mr. Grone. We are putting in place the process to
individually meter our assets, individual assets.
Ms. Norton. Mr. Winstead, are your buildings metered?
Mr. Winstead. We do. That is a requirement. We are. In the
older ones we are retrofitting, we are metering our buildings,
and that is part of what I was demonstrating.
Ms. Norton. Is that minimally necessary?
Mr. Grone. Sorry.
Ms. Norton. To hold anybody accountable, is that minimally
necessary?
Mr. Grone. Yes, yes, absolutely.
Ms. Norton. I can understand why it didn't happen before.
So this is being done throughout your inventory.
Mr. Grone. Yes. Yes, but my point in raising it was to
emphasize that while we are very focused inside the actual
constructed asset for the Department of Defense, I don't want
to speak for DOE but for any of us at large that manage for the
taxpayer and the Government, large installation complexes, the
distribution systems as important a consideration in the
equation as what happens inside the actual built asset itself.
It is something that we have to pay attention to and we are
paying attention.
Ms. Norton. Of course, that would be huge capital costs to
go about modernizing the systems themselves.
What was so intriguing about Ms. Walraven said is how they
have to compete in order to lease from the Federal Government
and have to be below a certain CPI. Therefore, in a real sense,
they have no place else to go but energy savings and other
savings that they can effect in order to compete to get this
very valuable thing called a Federal lease. That is built-in.
This is like the beauty the private sector.
What I am looking for are incentives in the public sector.
The public sector does not have built-in incentives. It does
not have a bottom line. People who would turn off the lights
and turn off their own computers won't think a thing about not
doing it in the workplace.
I have to say to my staff when I go into these little
kitchens, this is a messy place. Would you keep your own
kitchen like this? Of course not but since it is shared and
somebody else is paying for it.
I would like to know what, if any, incentives. I am talking
about anything from bonuses. We heard about performance. That
is a great incentive, of course, if it has meaning. A certain
percentage of your performance shall be. I mean GSA knows how
to do points when somebody wants to compete for a lease. The
Federal Government does performance measures.
I wonder if there is any manager who has as a part of her
performance measures a specific amount of that performance
measure that is energy-related, however that is defined in the
Federal Government today. Does anybody know of anybody?
The Army, we already learned that the military holds people
accountable, but I would like to know about specifics. You know
how you will be rewarded based on very specific old-fashioned
ways of supervising people. This is a fairly new way.
Mr. Winstead. Madam Chair, I will be happy to get you,
because as I mentioned on the regional, our property managers
on the regional level are, in fact, under the quarterly review,
the biannual review and end of the year review, actually
performance standards are operating these buildings, ensuring
that they are communicating to the tenants for energy
conservation action. They are accountable for that in their
performance measure.
I will be happy to get you a copy.
Ms. Norton. They are accountable for what?
Mr. Winstead. For actually implementing and tracking and
encouraging both in terms of operating.
Ms. Norton. You see, that is what I don't understand. Of
course, they are.
Mr. Winstead. Yes.
Ms. Norton. But how is that measured? When it comes time to
rate their performance, how is that incorporated into their own
performance which can decide if they have a bonus, which can
decide whether they get promoted and the like?
Mr. Winstead. Yes, Madam Chair, it is a part of linking
budget to performance appraisal that is in place now. Their
actions in compliance with both the standard reflected in their
performance plan and obviously the operating and maintenance
standards of our buildings, they are incentivized through a
bonus system through linking budget to performance.
We are essentially evaluating performance of property
managers based upon their adherence to our energy operational
principles and obviously communication and working with tenants
to have them mirror those actions. So we do have one in place,
and I would be happy to share with you without a name attached
but a traditional performance which is done ever year for every
major property manager responsible for that.
I will be happy to get that to the Committee, and I will
also go back to our chief people officer and find out if there
is more we can do in that regard, if there are more ways.
Ms. Norton. I appreciate it.
For example, Mr. Grone, I am just trying to make those of
us who live in the average real world understand.
Suppose you have a base commander. Now I know the Army
measures these guys in very specific ways. A base commander who
is in charge of--I don't know--let us say Bolling Air Force
Base, is part of the way he is evaluated as a base commander
have anything to do with energy conservation and consumption,
any guidance?
Mr. Grone. Yes. I would request that I get a more detailed
answer for you for the record.
[Information follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. Grone. As I indicated in my opening statement, the Army
for installation commanders is building exactly that profile
into their requirements. The Secretary of the Air Force has
made energy demand management and energy issues a key component
of the Air Force leadership requirement.
How each of the components are building that into
performance expectations particularly for the military staff,
the command element, as well as for senior executives who are
charged with implementing and achieving the goals and
objectives, I would prefer to get that for you on a more
detailed basis.
Ms. Norton. I wish you would. I understand that these
questions are very specific. The reason we are asking such
specific questions, recognizing that you do not have all of
this at your fingertips, is that when we codify something, we
want to codify something from real life. Some of what you are
saying suggests that real life exists here, and if we would
only spread it, we could do it.
The things that I am asking, if you could get it to us
within 30 days, we would very much appreciate it because we are
working on statutory guidance.
I notice that Mr. Stanley in his testimony said something
that was related to one of my earlier questions. He talked
about the Green Building Act of 2005 which established
legislation to create and here he says a task force of green
building experts, environmental advocates, government
representatives and industry experts.
That is really what I was getting at when I said what kind
of collaboration exists between the public sector and the
private sector which has its own incentives because it has a
bottom line. Is there any such thing as the District of
Columbia task force?
Let us get everybody around the table. Does any such task
force operate on a continuing basis to advise the Federal
sector?
Mr. Winstead. Well, Madam Chair, there are a number.
First of all, I think GSA is the largest member of BOMA,
the private sector. In terms of the District, I know NCR is
engaged regularly, not only with their actions on green
building initiatives which is wonderful in terms of
incentivizing the private sector, but we actually use BOMA
training which is both public and private participants in the
management institute at BOMA. So I know that we are doing a
lot.
I would also mention that on the Federal level, we have a
lot of new.
Ms. Norton. Are any of the Defense Department sectors
involved in this BOMA since you have office buildings and other
buildings as well? I know you have habitats. You have something
very different, but you also have the same things that GSA has.
Mr. Winstead. Right, Madam Chair. The one thing I did want
to mention. Federal agencies now have the Federal Property
Council. There is also a non-profit group that is out there
that caucuses an annual lunch for both service providers and
Federal agency and real estate directors, but under the Federal
Property Council, we are working closely on building
performance standard sharing.
As you know, a lot of the action in the last five years has
been looking at our owned inventory, the 40 year plus buildings
that are our average age, and figuring out how we can share
experiences not just in energy performance and building
operations, but as you know we are excising our portfolio.
Just as Phil mentioned, we are actually disposing. We now
have tiered our assets and those that are under-performing for
energy reasons, for revenue, not achieving a 6 percent return
which is our return on investment, we are disposing of those
now. Even though it is an old inventory on average, we are
actually disposing of the tier three properties and getting
more efficient buildings by doing so and then adding everything
we have been talking about.
But we are sharing a lot of this through the Federal
Property Council.
Ms. Norton. The Federal Property Council, I am aware of,
and I think it is a very important and good thing.
Let me reflect the bias I have in favor of the private
sector. The private sector has incentives to get there and to
get to places that the public sector does not.
When I speak about Mr. Stanley's testimony, I am really
talking about prodding for best practices in a continuing way,
and I believe that prodding has to come from the private
sector. I just believe the people who have to do it as a bottom
line continually sitting with people who don't have to do it as
a bottom line will help us all, particularly since we share
many of these private facilities in the first place.
I understand these large organizations. I understand they
break down into smaller groups that are helpful. I am saying
that the best practices in this field are changing so quickly
that unless there is some continuous feedback from the people
who have to both live within a bottom line and to improve, I do
not have confidence--I who love government--that the government
will in fact move as well or as quickly as the private sector.
Mr. Winstead. We will try to take your charge and even be
more engaged.
I would just like to conclude. Maybe Phil has got some
thoughts.
There are three groups that I understand. There is the U.S.
Green Building Council that I have actually been engaged. There
is also an interagency energy management group that meets four
times a year in an interagency sustainability working group. So
we do have the structure.
Ms. Norton. That is within the government.
Mr. Winstead. Yes, but the U.S. Green Building Council.
Ms. Norton. I applaud that. I applaud that, but you just
heard me express greater confidence in people who have to save
money but still have to make improvements, and that is really
the private sector. Therefore, I would be much more interested
in the BOMA configurations keeping the Federal Government
informed of what it is doing in its buildings in order to meet
the lease requirements of the Federal Government.
I have no sense that there is anybody sitting over here who
feels, here where we are sitting, who feels the same
compunction to save money and to improve that somebody who has
the bottom line does. It is just the nature of the beast.
Therefore, I want to get in there with the beast who does have
that to contend with and have greater cross-fertilization the
way the District does.
The District sits down here. Who is ahead in the District
with the green building?
It is the private sector. We now have private sector people
saying my condo is a LEED condo. They tell us that, yes, there
is a value added and there is expense added, but they also have
found out that when people want to invest in a condo, that they
will do so and they can be sold on that.
I want to hear more from people who are making money on
putting up condos where people are willing to pay more for a
LEED condo than for one that is not. I want to hear from those
people because I think they know more than I do sitting in the
Federal sector where I don't have that pressure. That is why I
am pressing for that kind of close collaboration on a
continuing basis, not four times a week when we all meet and
then boast about what we have all done.
If anything, I have more faith in the Federal sector, Mr.
Grone, because it is a command structure. When they say do
something, it must be done as a matter of military discipline.
Go ahead, sir.
Mr. Grone. Madam Chair, we are all, GSA, the Department of
Energy, we in the Department with BOMA, we all participate in
the National Institute of Building Sciences, for example,
looking at how to define high performance buildings.
As I indicated earlier, we constantly strive to benchmark
our practices for our cost and management models which 10 years
ago did not exist. We have come an enormous way in the last 10
years in the Department of Defense in understanding what it
means to sustain and recapitalize our asset base, and we do not
do that simply by looking at what did it cost us last year to
run the enterprise. We constantly go out and check against the
best costing and management practices to build those into our
budget and programming process to try to understand what does
it take.
Now we don't, in a risk-based judgment, always fulfill that
obligation to 100 percent, but we understand where we are
taking risk. That is part of the process that we are trying to
build.
The question of the bottom line is very important to us. Do
we think about it in exactly the same terms? No, but for this
Department, the business of installation is a $56 billion
business as represented by the President's budget this year.
Everything from services to environmental remediation to
construction activity to operations and maintenance, it is a
$56 billion enterprise.
The objective of improving the military capability and
readiness of those assets, improving their efficiency, returns
funds to the bottom line that can then be put on people, on
training, on military readiness, on procurement.
Ms. Norton. But does it? When you say funds, it goes to the
Treasury.
Mr. Grone. No. Our ability to avoid costs in the future,
our ability to have a more efficient, more effective, better
asset base that is managed, to the extent that we can reduce
our total operating costs, those are funds that we can then in
subsequent budgets put to better effect on military readiness.
For us, the bottom line, it is not the bottom of a P and L
sheet, a profit and loss statement, but it is the ability to
return funds to the warfighter for readiness purposes.
Reducing the total operating costs of that support
infrastructure, that $56 billion enterprise, making it more
efficient, the motivator for us is more efficient, more
effective facilities that can deliver military readiness for
the warfighter. As we are looking for areas where we can save
funds, make ourselves more efficient, we are doing it with that
objective. It is a different objective than a private sector
enterprise has, but it is an objective nonetheless, and it is
one we take very seriously.
Ms. Norton. It is an important objective. There is a
difference in kind, but it is important.
Mr. Grone. I think it is important for the Subcommittee to
understand why, what motivates our management model, and that
is in large measure what motivates our management model.
Ms. Norton. Why is it that GSA and the Defense Logistics
Agency are continually apparently, according to our
investigation, to supply Federal customers with inefficient as
well as efficient energy-using products? I mean both are
happening.
What determines whether you purchase an efficient energy-
using product for your customers or an inefficient one?
Mr. Winstead. Well, Madam Chair, both at GSA on the FAS
side as well as the PBS side--obviously, I have mentioned
mostly on the building side--but FAS, I know that there have
been some issues in some of the products in terms of their
energy sustainability.
Ms. Norton. Is there a cost matter? Do you always buy
energy efficient products for your customers? Our information
is that is not the case.
All we are trying to find out is what determines it. Is it
budgetary? Who gets to make these decisions?
Mr. Winstead. Well, from the standpoint of the client, on
the FAS obviously, the purchase of scheduled cleaning equipment
and materials, actually that decision is a client-driven
decision.
Ms. Norton. That is my point. Clients don't know anything.
Clients, obviously, will look to GSA for guidance. Clients will
come in and say, I need X, Y, Z equipment. They only know the
kind of equipment they have now.
Unless somebody who knows the state of the art says, but
that is not the most energy efficient equipment, therefore we
recommend this other equipment, he is going to continue to
order whatever he has got at hand.
Mr. Winstead. Right. It is my understand, Madam Chair, that
we are, in fact, changing the schedules and putting the ENERGY
STAR products up at the top. So that is something that is
underway.
Ms. Norton. So why are the others on it at all, sir?
Mr. Winstead. Well, I think they are on it because of the
vendors obviously getting on FAS schedules and wanting to
market their products.
Ms. Norton. What does that have to do with us if we are
supposed to be buying ENERGY STAR products?
Mr. Winstead. I understand totally. I mean we are trying to
move the sustainable energy-sensitive products, and that is my
understanding of what we are doing on the FAS side. We are
moving.
Ms. Norton. Mr. Grone, at least that is our understanding,
that both kinds are there. If you can have your druthers and
you don't have any information, then you may end up choosing.
You, the client. You, the customer. We are all one big happy
Federal Government on the taxpayer dollar choosing the energy
inefficient.
You may do it for the same reason you do it if you go to
buy something at a store. You say, oh, well, that looks like it
is cheaper, so why don't I buy that?
Why should we have on any list anything but ENERGY STAR
equipment?
Mr. Grone. Well, Madam Chair, the Defense Logistics Agency
doesn't come under my direct purview. What I would like to do
is go back and consult with General Dail, the Director of DLA,
and then come back and provide information for the record or a
briefing to staff or to yourself about we think about that and
how they manage it.
Ms. Norton. I would appreciate it.
Mr. Grone. I would be perfectly happy to go back and
consult with General Dail and bring that forward to you.
Ms. Norton. I very much appreciate receiving that
information within 30 days. Remember, we are trying to use your
own practices in developing practices here.
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Mr. Winstead. I will get you a list, Madam Chair, of those
products.
Ms. Norton. Say that again, Mr. Winstead.
Mr. Winstead. The products, the ENERGY STAR and energy-
sensitive products, I will get to you a list of how we are
pushing them up in the head of this.
Ms. Norton. Yes, and would you get to me an understanding
of why any other products are on the list? Is there a big
difference in cost or something?
Now you have testified here about what the savings is. So I
don't know why the others wouldn't say, guess what, unless you
get to be like these ENERGY STAR people, you have no preference
to be on our list.
That is a very valuable list to be on. How do you get on
the list especially given that is what the guidelines and what
the Executive Order says you are supposed to do?
How can we have a policy to use ENERGY STAR and yet you can
get on the GSA list? I am not sure about the Defense Logistics
Agency except our information is that both have both kinds on
the list
Mr. Winstead. Again, this is something we are now focusing
on. David Bibb, our Administrator, is looking at it. My
understanding is within the next four months we are going to
have them, and I will get back to your question of how the
other products end up on the schedule. I mean I assume it is
some contract.
Ms. Norton. Would you within 30 days tell us?
Mr. Winstead. Sure.
Ms. Norton. Give us any reason other products should be on
it.
Now, here, let me help you out. The only reason I can think
of is you have got some old something here, if you have got
some old piece of equipment that will only take a non-ENERGY
STAR piece of equipment. I didn't think it worked that way, but
maybe that is why you have to have the other on the list.
Mr. Winstead. Yes, replacement parts for older equipment
would be the case.
Mr. Grone. Or in some cases, Madam Chair, there may be
other performance criteria that can only be satisfied
conceivably by a product that is less energy-efficient. So it
would be a balancing question.
Ms. Norton. What would that be? Give me an example of what
that would be?
Mr. Grone. There could be a militarily unique product, that
performance characteristics are either in terms of power
delivered or whatever.
Ms. Norton. That is interesting because I always thought
that the ENERGY STAR also improved performance.
Mr. Grone. If you are looking at the question narrowly as a
question of energy consumption and the product from that
perspective, that will lead you perhaps to that conclusion. But
there may be occasionally products, and we will go back and
take a look at this to see if we can illuminate on it, but
there will be occasionally products where other performance
characteristics are more important in terms of a mission
delivery or a capability than that.
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Mr. Grone. That said, we are trying to, as a Department,
across the tactical and non-tactical areas do everything we can
to embed energy efficiency into the method of getting that
improved performance, so we can get to the objective that you
have described, but in terms of the existing list, that could
be one of the answers.
Ms. Norton. Mr. Winstead, on page 17 of your testimony, you
mention something that seems to be at odds with some of your
answers here. You say, you talk about needing flexibility in
capital projects to incorporate energy savings technology that
was not included in the design at the time the prospectus was
submitted.
I thought you said that you are incorporating these
matters. I would expect that to be in the prospectus. Do you
mean you perhaps have to come back and what do you mean by
flexibility?
Mr. Winstead. I think flexibility in terms of the various
options and systems. The P100 sets the standards for
performance in new buildings, but I think the flexibility is
how do we address that. Obviously, climate matters. In San
Francisco, you can have an unair-conditioned/heated building.
In Washington, you obviously have to have both.
Ms. Norton. Because if you need the flexibility, you are
talking to the Subcommittee that would be prepared to build
that flexibility into prospectuses if you can show that there
would be energy savings results.
Mr. Winstead. That is correct and whether there was some
new technology after the submittal as well. I mean is there
something more efficient than what was originally scoped out.
Ms. Norton. Within 30 days, please get us information on
how we can make sure the prospectuses are not behind the time
because you do submit a prospectus.
Mr. Winstead. Okay.
Ms. Norton. I don't know. You submit a prospectus for the
new headquarters.
Mr. Winstead. Right.
Ms. Norton. For the DHS, the Coast Guard, that must have
been five years ago. Anyway, it was a long time ago. We
certainly wouldn't want to be frozen in time if all it took
were some changes in the prospectus or, in the alternative,
building in some flexibility.
I would like to ask you about so-called delegated
buildings, buildings that you don't manage, but you delegate it
to the agency. What do you do to assure that these buildings,
which are completely under the management of the agency, are
not dealing with energy consumption above the benchmark? What
do you do if they are?
How do you monitor such delegated buildings?
Mr. Winstead. Actually, both in terms of our delegation
when we do delegate, in Washington, NCR has a lot of single
tenant delegated buildings, much more so than any place else in
our portfolio. Within those delegations, there are guidelines
to the standard operating procedures that ensure that they are
following energy management and conservation plans to achieve
the Federal mandates in the new bill, both the executive order
and the energy policy.
Ms. Norton. How do make sure it happens? What is the
enforcement mechanism? You have given it over to the agency.
Mr. Winstead. Right. We do require the delegated agencies
to be accountable for what they have done under the implemented
guidelines; also, the Department of Energy.
Ms. Norton. How often do they report back? You see I am
looking for mechanisms that are above policy. The policies are
in place.
Mr. Winstead. They report back annually.
Madam Chair, you are well aware, I think, that the GAO
recently did a review of delegated buildings, and we are now
tightening up our review overall of performance under our
delegations to our GSA standards. I think in terms of their
energy performance, we are and will continue to scrutinize how
they are managing their energy costs that are consistent with
what we are trying to do in the non-delegated part of the
portfolio.
I think the SOP actually lays out the guidelines, and we
are reviewing them annually, and we are going to be heightening
the scrutiny for at least delegations.
Ms. Norton. I know if it is single tenant building, the
custom is to delegate it. That is just all away from you
altogether. What percentage of your buildings are delegated
buildings, Mr. Winstead?
Mr. Winstead. Madam Chair, I don't know the exact, but it
is basically dominant. It is basically 200 buildings out of our
1,500. So what is that? Seven percent or so.
Ms. Norton. They are big ones like Ronald Reagan, I guess.
Is Ronald Reagan such a building or is that your building?
Mr. Winstead. Multi-tenanted building, it is our building
but the Department of Agriculture.
Ms. Norton. USDA would be such a building.
Mr. Winstead. Sorry.
Ms. Norton. USDA would be such a building.
Mr. Winstead. Yes, USDA is such a building.
Ms. Norton. I am interested in your getting a hold of them
as a matter of performance and not merely as a matter of
policy, and I am interested in working with you. We are
interested in making easier for you to do as we codify what
should be.
I think, Mr. Grone, you could be. I often find the military
has found ways to do things that are helpful on the civilian
side, and I was intrigued by the so-called awareness program
for military housing. You have all these military bases strewn
all over the world. You have military housing, millions of
people in them. You have got hospital facilities. I mean you
are a country unto yourself.
Tell us about this awareness program, particularly since we
are interested in changing the culture.
Mr. Grone. Well, the awareness programs that the various
components run are a critical and ongoing process where our
people are informed about the need to conserve, how to
conserve. In many cases, they are tied back to specific
programs.
Ms. Norton. If somebody lives in military housing, is that
soldier, let us say, he and his family, responsible for all the
utilities that are used? He pays for it or does DOD pay for it?
Mr. Grone. In our military housing that has been
privatized, utilities are built into the lease arrangement. So
in that sense the member does pay utilities.
Ms. Norton. That helps.
Mr. Grone. Traditionally, in military family housing,
members did not pay lease payments or care for utilities or the
like, and the classic free rider problem, economic free rider
problem often occurred. In our privatized housing in the end
state, we will have well in excess of 90 percent of our
military family housing privatized.
Ms. Norton. Ninety percent is now privatized?
Mr. Grone. I will have to get the current number for the
record, but in the end state, we will be in the 95, 96 percent
range.
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Ms. Norton. End state, you said?
Mr. Grone. In the end state, yes, when we are completed
with the program.
The sensitivity to utilities and utility management and as
we privatize those projects, as we privatize those assets, I
know it was a question I know of some interest to you and the
staff had raised it as well. How do we think about that?
Each of the services, when we go out and think about the
privatization of a military family housing area, sets some
basic standards and guidelines into their request for proposals
and how they want to think about that. In many cases, the local
municipalities and utility companies and the District of
Columbia may do something similar, but they often have baseline
compliance requirements for energy management in new projects
or development projects.
In the procurement process the components give, we try not
to be too specific to bind the hands of innovation, but there
are credits that are given in the assessment process of the bid
proposals when they come in for energy compliance,
conservation, innovation to the point where the classic and
best example of this and the headline example of this is the
Army's family housing privatization project in Hawaii which is
the largest demonstrated use of solar ray in a housing
development in the world.
Five thousand units of housing all with photovoltaic laid
down, and that saves several thousand tons of carbon emissions
a year. I believe the number is 10,000, but we can get that for
the record, on an annual basis. So it is a fairly significant
effort in our housing privatization projects.
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Mr. Grone. Again, we are trying to incentivize the
contractor base, the development base. As they bring these
projects forward, they are incentivized to bring the best
innovation and practice. Not a mil spec answer, what should the
answer be, but we are relying on our private partners through
incentives in the bid proposal process to bring us projects
that rely on the best of private practice and the best
innovation that is available to us at the time that we do the
procurement.
Ms. Norton. One last question, Mr. Stanley, from your
testimony, I am not sure I understand how the municipal
aggregation program works. You speak about it being a reverse
online auction for electricity procurement. Could you explain
that to us, please?
Mr. Stanley. Sure. There are a number of different ways of
procuring electricity. For most D.C. residents, you procure
electricity through what is called a standard offer service.
Ms. Norton. Speak up into that microphone.
Mr. Stanley. I apologize.
Ms. Norton. It is not your fault. Something is wrong with
these microphones. It couldn't be that 100 percent of the
people who testify before us have the same problem. It is on
our end. So, go ahead.
Mr. Stanley. There are a number of ways of procuring
electricity in the District of Columbia. For most District
residents, electricity is procured through the local utility
provider through what is called a standard offer service. By
contrast, what the District of Columbia has done is it has
aggregated all of its electricity use and it has put out for
bid a request, well, a request for bids for providing utilities
to the District of Columbia.
What happens is that a number of providers will then submit
bids to the District of Columbia and what has resulted is that
we are now in a situation where we stand to save about $30
million over 3 years because we are not doing a standard offer
service procurement but instead we have put it out for bid. It
has been a significant value for the District of Columbia.
We have been less successful in being able to provide that
same type of service on the residential side, but we are
working very hard to find a way of making sure that not only
District Government benefits but also non-profit agencies
within the District of Columbia as well as residences also.
I am not sure if that helps to clarify it a little bit
better.
Ms. Norton. It does.
Mr. Winstead, you are obviously serviced through local
municipal power companies as well, isn't that right?
Mr. Winstead. That is correct. We have about 104 area-wide
utility contracts, and we also have reverse online procurement
for electricity in deregulated markets. So we have both
somewhat what the District is doing as well as about 104
contracts.
Ms. Norton. Well, I want to thank all four of you for
really very helpful testimony as we try to do think through
what to do.
We are not going to prescribe in statute what to do. We are
going to delegate to the GSA the framework for a mechanism to
both incentivize and enforce best practices in energy
conservation, and you have been immensely helpful, all four of
you, in providing a basis for the statutory guidance we are
working on as we speak.
Thank you very much for attending.
[Whereupon, at 12:17 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
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