Today, BOMA International released an update to its groundbreaking BOMA Energy Performance Contracting (BEPC) model—which was first released in 2008—to reflect new and emerging best practices. Above, we snapped Capstone Property Management's Kent Gibson (BOMA chair-elect and Fellow), Corporate Sustainability Strategies' Brenna Walraven, Los Angeles Better Building Challenge's Dave Hodgins, and BEPC advisory board member and former DOE exec Arah Schuur, who introduced the new model. What it does: provides a conceptual framework and supporting template documents to help private business owners and operators develop and execute investment-grade energy efficiency retrofits to enhance asset value. It works with all possible funding sources, including Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs, Arah notes.

Brenna tells us that a generous grant from Yardi also encouraged the relaunch. Since 2008, the BEPC toolkit has been used to facilitate projects in more than 20 cities across five continents, including at AT&T Tower (above) in Los Angeles. These projects and lessons learned from them, as well as changes in the energy retrofit energy industry, have been taken into account for this update, they say. "During the recession, top owners still made energy efficient updates, but went for the low-hanging fruit," Dave says. "But now they're making major capital decisions to upgrade equipment, so this is great timing." In addition to simplifying these investments, the toolkit is also designed to provide transparency on pricing and performance expectations. You can learn more about it tomorrow in Room 213 at 2:15pm.