Good afternoon, everybody. This is Doug Linde, President of BXP, and I'm joined by Ben Myers, our SVP of Sustainability. For the next hour or so, we are going to try and provide a pretty robust perspective on the activities at BXP around sustainability. Before we sort of go forward, I just thought I would go back for a minute and give you some perspective. In 2015, Ben joined the sustainability portion of the organization. He actually was here before that, he was in our construction department in Boston. But prior to that, BXP had always been thinking about sustainability, but we really didn't use that word. What we really thought about was how do we manage our costs?
Our costs were really a function of, from an operating expense perspective, two major things: real estate taxes and utilities. Utilities is everything from electricity, to gas, to steam, to water. We had started on a journey of figuring out how we could manage and over time continue to, as best we can, reduce those expenses. So from, you know, the earliest times, what we were thinking about really was: so how do we reduce the amount of kilowatt hours or the amount of steam, or the amount of natural gas, or the amount of water we were using on a day-to-day basis? At the beginning, it was really about how do we more efficiently use our equipment? How do we think about the hours of operation?
Are there things that we can do from a management perspective that will drive a reduction in kilowatt hours? And in previous sessions, I think Ben has talked to you about just sort of the journey that we've been on, on a building like 200 Clarendon Street, which is, you know, formerly the John Hancock Tower. We started using the word sustainability, but it's really about the same concept, which is: how does BXP find ways to manage its expenses? And now that's really moved into not just reducing the amount of hours of energy that we are using or water that we're using, but in fact, the-- where that energy is being created.
That obviously brings into this whole concept of the impact that our energy use has on the carbon footprint of BXP and the impact that has on the environment. And so we have, I think, morphed into a company that thinks about sustainability slightly differently than we did in 2000... pre-2014 or 2015. But nonetheless, the overall objective is the same, which is: how do we become a company that can manage and potentially reduce its cost by doing things that are both in the benefit of our shareholders and in the benefit of our various constituencies, and the environment itself?
And so as Ben talks to you today about the activities that we are undergoing and the things that we are doing, it'll be interesting, I think, for you to have the perspective of how we're sort of moving down this chain of going from simply managing the amount of hours of electricity or fuel or steam that we're using, to how do we actually get it produced? And when it gets produced, where is it actually coming from, and is there a cost or not a cost associated with doing it in a more sustainable way? And so from, from my perspective, this, this is a sort of linchpin, constant perspective that BXP has about all of its costs, all of its operations.
And I just sort of want to give you one last comment before I turn the call over to Ben, which is: we're thinking about this not just in the context of the operation of our buildings, but also in the context of the built environment. And one of the things we did a number of years ago, and again, this is a little bit out there, but I think it gives you a perspective on sort of how we're thinking about this, is we made an investment in a venture firm called Energy Impact Partners.
The reason we did that was because we wanted to get a seat at the table as we looked about how not only is power generated, but also how are various materials being generated, and are there ways we can influence our buildings as we potentially build new things in ways that will not have a cost premium, but hopefully be either cost indifferent or cost lower, and also be more adaptive to the issues associated with reducing the carbon footprint that BXP puts into the world. And so that's sort of the context that I think we should all be thinking about today as Ben goes through his presentation. So, Ben, take it from here.
Great. Thank you for the introduction, Doug, and, and greetings from the sustainability desk. I'm glad so many of you could join us for this webinar. I am very pleased to provide an update on our sustainability program as part of our broader stakeholder engagement efforts. This year, as Doug mentioned, marks my 10th year running our-- and building our program here at BXP, and the input from our stakeholders has been essential to how we've developed our program from the early days to where we are today. And so I will give you three things today, I hope. First, a program and performance overview, and then how we're leading the energy transition, and how we're preparing to execute in a low carbon economy.... Those are the objectives of this pre-presentation.
There are many details about our program, included in our sustainability impact report that was issued on Earth Day. I want to recognize the many colleagues across our organization that work on preparing a wide array of environmental and social indicators, and run programs related to environmental and social performance that are included in our sustainability impact report. Please give that a look if you haven't already. Some 2023 highlights relevant to today's conversation that I want to focus on is first and foremost, we reduced like-for-like energy use 7.2% in 2023 compared to 2022, and water use was reduced 9.1%. A large share of that was due to efficiency improvements made at the GM Building, some weather-related reductions, and the implementation of Measurabl for real-time energy use management.
I'll talk a little bit more about how we're using Measurabl for measurement and verification on a net zero project we've recently completed. We remained on track to achieve carbon neutral operations by 2025. A major goal for the company, it's our second carbon reduction target. And then managing transition risks and building performance standard compliance by retro-commissioning an additional 9 million sq ft of our portfolio. We executed a large power purchase agreement for additionality, adding 21 MW of new solar generation capacity as a component of our strategy to reduce carbon emissions in a meaningful way. We issued an additional $750 million of green bonds as our sixth green bond offering, and we increased our efforts to advance built environment climate technology through our engagement and investment with Energy Impact Partners, as Doug mentioned in his remarks.
We like to say sustainability at BXP is integrated from the boardroom to the boiler room. So we have a team of three in our corporate office here in Boston that works across all of our regions to implement our sustainability program. We have a direct line of reporting to Doug Linde, our President, who joins me here today, our CEO, Owen Thomas, and our board of directors. We have a dedicated sustainability committee of our board that meets formally twice a year and provides oversight for our program. We also have a sustainable operations committee that includes many of our engineering and property management leaders across the organization, and a corporate sustainability steering committee that includes other functions like legal and marketing, and HR, and risk, that oversee our reporting efforts and how we're communicating the... what we're doing across the company.
Our team is primarily focused on environmental performance management, technology and innovation, renewable energy development and procurement, reporting, analysis and certification, and various stakeholder engagement activities. The company has been highly decorated as a sustainability leader. We recently were recognized by EPA with an ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year Sustained Excellence Award. We have a Fitwel Best in Building Health award from 2024, and we've ranked very high as a leader in GRESB with a Green Star rating now for nearly a decade. In Sustainalytics, we're in the top 5% of the global universe, and we're listed on the DJSI North American Index and maintain an MSCI AA rating. One of the awards I'm proudest of from this year, which we got in April, is the Department of Energy's Better Climate Challenge Goal Achievement.
We participate with about 900 partners in the Better Buildings, Better Climate program, and we were able to demonstrate a 64% emissions intensity reduction from a 2018 base year for actively managed portfolio. We work with many organizations like DOE, including the Urban Land Institute, the Real Estate Roundtable, and others, to engage with peers and other companies and other industries, other asset classes, on decarbonization and energy efficiency. We have been involved in several working groups as part of DOE's program offering, where they bring highly skilled technical resources to the table to solve decarbonization of the built environment. It's been a wonderful engagement with DOE. Goals have been a major piece of our program. Since 2015, we've been establishing public targets for energy, emissions, water, and waste.
We have a 32% energy use intensity reduction by 2025, below a 2008 base year that we've achieved, and a new target for energy use reduction is being developed with 2030 in mind for the target year. So we've set targets, we've achieved targets, we've reset more ambitious targets, we've achieved those targets, and now we're setting our third round of targets for energy and water. We have a net zero science-based target that is being established. Target and reduction strategy planning is underway. We've achieved our goals for our first science-based target, which was aligned with a 1.5-degree level. We were the first office company in North America to have a science-based target at the 1.5-degree level, and that included a Scope 3 component of a 14% reduction, which we have achieved.
I mentioned our 2025 carbon neutral operations goal. I'll unpack that a little bit more in a second. We have a building certification target that we adopted as part of our revolving credit facility commitment, and we, where we've linked our RCF to sustainability metrics. That required an 87% coverage by 2025 of green building certifications. We've exceeded that goal as well in 2023, with 91% of our portfolio certified ENERGY STAR, LEED, and/or Fitwel.... We've also, as I mentioned, achieved our water goal, and that will also be addressed as it in 2030. We plan to announce new targets in 2025. The one area we've had significant challenges is on waste diversion. This is for a couple reasons.
Primarily, the dynamics around recycling have changed significantly in the United States, where contamination has become an issue, and haulers are more discerning about how much contamination they will accept. So we like the term wish cycling. A lot of people used to wish cycle and throw stuff that didn't belong in there, and it would end up being recycled or at least marked as recycled. Nowadays, that's not happening, and loads are being rejected, and so we're having to put more of our waste by tonnage in the trash as a result. However, in 2023, we made very significant progress, increasing our overall diversion rate to 51%, which is respectable. Our goal is to get to 60 by 2025.
I think it's a bit of a stretch, but we are working across our organization to increase our composting, which is now more than 10% of our total waste stream, and to engage our retailers, where food and beverage with heavy organics is a large source of landfill waste that we think we can address through more engagement. So the awards and recognition are great. It's really the highlights and impact that we are most focused on. These are some of our advances we've made. If it's not otherwise stated, all this is measured against a 2008 base year. We've reduced our energy use intensity a full 41%. We have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions, whole buildings, Scope 1, 2, and 3, 64%. We've reduced our water use 48%, also on an intensity basis in gallons per square foot.
We've increased our waste diversion 41%, and we now have 91%, as I mentioned, of our portfolio certified. Of our portfolio that is LEED certified, 92% of it is certified at the highest LEED Gold and Platinum levels. And that's, that's an important thing, for me, personally. It's not good enough for our company to simply be LEED certified. We are really pushing towards the highest LEED Gold and Platinum levels when we attempt to certify buildings LEED, and we have a standing LEED Gold certification target for new development. On the financial side, $50 million of annual energy and water-related operating expenses are avoided. To Doug's opening remarks, it's hugely important to our program. We've implemented hundreds of energy conservation measures with an average simple payback below four years.
So we continue to bring forward good projects and work across our property management teams with engineering to identify and recommend projects. And if the projects make economic sense, we will certainly implement them. Part of the retro commissioning effort that I mentioned, the 9 million ft, was to identify some of this higher fruit, right? A lot of the low-hanging fruits fit has been picked. The LED lighting retrofit projects have largely been completed. So we're having to get a little bit more technical, bringing in resources to tune buildings up, to walk the entire buildings, and to look for different measures around programming and sequences and controls, dampers that aren't opening and closing. Really getting deep into the weeds on what can be done to shave kilowatt hours at our buildings.
9.7% of shares outstanding are held by around 468 ESG funds, and we—as I mentioned, we've issued 6 green bonds totaling $5.1 billion, where we have restrictions on use. Yes?
I would just comment right here that one of the things that we think about is the resilience of our buildings. Resilience of our buildings is not just in the context of, are they resilient to weather-related challenges associated with changes in the built environment, and climate, you know, change. In fact, making sure that no different than at BXP, we think about being in premier buildings versus being in sort of commodity buildings. We believe that buildings that are as tight as they possibly can be relative to their efficiency using utilities and becoming as close to carbon neutral as possible, will be the kind of buildings that institutional capital will flow to on a going-forward basis.
And so while it's not necessarily reflected in any of these numbers, we believe it's reflected in the, in, I guess, the sort of patina of our buildings and, hopefully, the distinguishment of our buildings on a going-forward basis. And so this, this stuff is... It doesn't just have a short-term, from our perspective, payback in terms of managing our utility costs and saving money relative to how much utilities we're using and the fact that utility costs are going up every year. But in fact, it's also pushing us forward in that journey to become as, as tight as possible and as interesting as possible on a long-term basis to folks who want to own commercial, institutional, high-quality, premier office assets.
Great point, Doug. Thank you. So I'd mentioned our history of setting goals going back to 2015, and some of the steps we've taken are aligning with the Science-Based Targets initiative, the establishment of our carbon neutral operations target in 2020, joining the Better Climate Challenge in 2021. And this year, we are very much focused on establishing our third round of energy and water targets. Oh, there's a lot of discussion across the industry around carbon emissions and carbon emissions accounting. We have been disclosing carbon emissions voluntarily for about 10 years, beginning with emission scopes 1 and 2, and getting more sophisticated on a Scope 3 emissions calculations. So in our sustainability impact report, you will find a complete accounting of both location-based emissions and market-based emissions.
Scope 1 emissions are emissions associated with the combustion of gas and a little bit of diesel and backup generators on site. Scope 2 emissions are emissions that are sourced from the grid, essentially. So all the power we procure from the grid, along with steam, where we have connections with district steam systems in Boston and New York. Scope 3 emissions are all the indirect emissions associated with business activities, associated with downstream leased assets, which is our biggest categories, representing 60% of our total market-based emissions. That would be tenant power that we do not control. We also have a rather large share of emissions associated with new development. And to Doug's points on how we want to get involved more in the innovation around building materials, our efforts to source greener materials, so lower carbon concrete, lower carbon steel.
Today, 12% of our emissions, approximately, are from development, but I'd say 2023 was a rather slow development year for BXP. In a typical year, we expect the number to be around 15%-20%. So, say, 1/5 on the high side of our emissions are from development, which is why the attention to building materials is so important. Carbon neutral operations is our primary decarbonization goal. We are focused on emission scopes 1 and 2 across our actively managed office properties, representing about 42 million sq ft. And in a 2008 base year, the dark blue bar to the furthest to the left, this represented around a quarter million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. So since then, we've cut that down about a third, just through energy efficiency, through energy conservation.
Another 32% has been reduced through grid and district steam improvements. So these are improvements we're taking from the fuel switching for steam generation, from fuel oil to natural gas, and from the grid getting incrementally greener. And the rate at which the grid gets greener is highly relevant to carbon emissions from buildings. So emissions, when we talk about emissions in the built environment, with the exception of a few very rare cases, particularly for office buildings, are not being generated in the buildings. They're coming from natural gas plants, primarily operating on the grid, producing power that the buildings consume. So the grid getting greener directly impacts the carbon profile of our assets. So we've gone out of our way voluntarily to do a number of green power procurement contracts across all of our regions.
Those have reduced our emissions 27%, and we expect around the end of this year, beginning of next year, to procure the last 8% or so through the form of carbon credits. Our goal is to make this number as small as possible. We're trying to drive the efficiency up as high as we can and reduce our carbon credit procurement to the lowest possible amount. Renewable energy, as, as Doug mentioned, thinking about where our energy comes from, has been a change in our mindset around energy and energy conservation. Energy source and energy procurement has become an effort to shift our sources from brown to green, where it's possible. So we procure about 500,000 MWh of power.
Expect it'll be in that range in 2025, 2026, and it breaks down approximately as follows: 11% today will come from additionality RECs. 24% will come from specific source RECs, meaning we know the vintage and the origin, the specific projects the RECs come from. 27% are through green tariffs, so we're able to buy power from the utility, where they're going out and sourcing green power for our load. And then 38% are national RECs. Our goal is to increase additionality RECs, increase specific source RECs, and diminish national RECs over time. But it has to make economic sense for the business. When you do an additionality project, first you have to source the project, and we've been in the market actively for about three years. The 11% shown here was a deal we negotiated.
It took about 18 months to source, and it's a ... These are longer term contracts, so they are it's a specialty of our group to be able to go out and execute these additionality deals. We are in the market still, and we're considering more additionality contracting, and hopefully we'll have an update for that on, for you, next year when we meet.
Yeah, I would just, just make the following comment, which is the counterparty really matters with these things. And so to the extent that we are not comfortable with the counterparty that is gonna provide the, the generation, which for the most part, I think, Ben, correct me if I'm wrong, is really solar panels in, in fields across various areas, areas of the country. If, if we're not comfortable that they're gonna be able to perform or that they have the financial sustainability to enter into a 20+ year contract, it makes it very hard for us to find that counterparty. And so that's the reason why it takes 18 months to get an 11% additionality REC, you know, for a company that's got 500 million or 500,000 MW of power needs, right?
It's like there just aren't a lot of counterparties out there who have the, what we deem to be the credentials to enter into a contract.
... Yes, counterparty risk, pricing risk are risks one and two when we look at these deals. So I want to touch on compliance with sustainability regulation and client requirements, and this speaks to our efforts to manage our transition-related risks. So I had mentioned the importance of stakeholder engagement and stakeholder input through the development of our sustainability program. And two areas where we're seeing a lot of activity right now are from communities that are responding to public awareness around climate-related issues, and our clients that are also responding to their stakeholders by setting climate-related goals. So I want to address both of these stakeholder groups, communities and clients, and how BXP is working on serving these stakeholder interests. It's no secret that there has been a lot of regulatory activity related to sustainability over the last couple years.
I would point out first, the SEC's climate disclosure requirements that have been voluntarily stayed by the SEC. They're on pause, as of April 5th. However, they will require, if implemented, disclosure of Scope 1 and 2, and possibly Scope 3 emissions for large accelerated filers like BXP, and there's some alignment with the TCFD. We've proactively aligned our disclosures with the TCFD, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure recommendations, which can be found in our sustainability and impact report. So we are preparing for potentially disclosing in 2026, in our 10-K, the required disclosures associated with the SEC climate disclosure requirements. I think as interesting as the SEC's action is what's happening in California with the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act and the Climate-related Financial Risks Acts, SB 253 and SB 261.
These will apply to public and private companies with more than $1 billion of annual revenue. This regulation will require disclosure, not only of Scope 1 and 2, but also Scope 3 emissions and climate-related risks aligned with, again, aligned with TCFD or IFRS. There's some debate there on how they're gonna be aligned. In general, with the TCFD alignment, we think we're pretty well protected in that regard, although we do see some room for improvement on metrics, and we're gonna work with industry and others on what to disclose and how to disclose to make sure we're meeting the intent of these regulations. Information will be filed annually with the state of California, beginning in 2026.
I'll say, in both cases, with the SEC and the rules in California, BXP is in a very good position to meet these regulatory requirements, given our history of voluntary disclosure and the integration today of many disclosures in our 10-K related to sustainability. Lastly, on the local level, we're contending with a range of building performance standards, all with varying rules in Boston, Cambridge, New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. And we do get many questions from investors on how these regulations will impact BXP. So I think it's important today to clarify what we're doing in terms of planning and how BXP intends to comply with these regulations. So first-
Ben, just one question. Ben, one question for you before you go into the specifics, which is: these have been sort of in the... These regulations have been discussed for a long time, like, more than five years, probably closer to 10. And while nobody really knew what they would be, these people, I think, had a perspective of what direction they were going in. How would you describe what we have done over the last decade to sort of put ourselves in a position where this isn't—this is not really an event for us, this is sort of something that we just sort of have to deal with, as opposed to a, you know, sort of a monumental leap of change in the way we have to, quote-unquote, either invest in or operate our assets?
Right. So from a place of wanting to conserve costs, we began benchmarking energy performance at the asset level and identifying projects very early on. It predates my time here. It goes back probably 15 years, existing assets, looking very carefully at how they consume energy, where we consume energy, which we ramped up in, in 2015 when I joined. All of our assets are tracked in EPA Portfolio Manager, the tool used to comply with these regulations. So we've been using EPA Portfolio Manager, getting assets ENERGY STAR labeled long before these regulations came along. They just so happened to align with what we've been doing related to conservation and benchmarking using Portfolio Manager. We've also simplified input of data into Portfolio Manager using a couple tools. First is Measurabl.
So we have a data management platform that pushes data to Portfolio Manager, that is fed also, Portfolio Manager is also fed using from our utility bill management tool, from Enel data. So we are automatically populating approximately 80% of the data in Portfolio Manager, which means we're having to collect about 20% from check meters, other sources, where it's provided to us manually, and, and then we're spending a lot of time doing quality assurance. We don't have to spend as much time worrying about getting full data coverage, like a lot of other companies. We have the data. It's about making sure the data is as high quality as possible. So we go through a third-party assurance process.
We check all of our disclosed data annually, working with a third-party assurance provider, looking at meter-level entries across a very large population of the data we disclose. That process has made us better. Honestly, Doug, the amount of back and forth we do with the regions, with property management, with engineering, and the checking it out and quality control of data, I think, has helped us prepare for this, along with all the work we've done on energy efficiency. I spoke to the 41% reduction. That 41% reduction in energy use intensity puts us in good shape to comply with building performance standards through 2034, along with the renewable energy procurement work we've done, which I'll address in a second. We are preparing for these regs.
I'm gonna mention New York City's Local Law 97, which is the, the most popular, I'd say, of these regulations, the one that most people talk about, and then Boston's BERDO, BERDO 2.0, the Building Energy Reporting and Disclosure Ordinance. I also wanna briefly mention commercial energy codes and ASHRAE 90.1, which is the base code, across many jurisdictions. I know this graph may be slightly hard to read on the left, but what it's showing here is in the, say, mid-1970s through the 1980s, what you could build on this index on the left, which goes up to 100, uses about twice as much energy as what you can build today. So energy codes have come a very long way, and today, a lot of codes are aligned with ASHRAE 90.1, 2019.
So leading jurisdictions are aligning with 2019. Lagging jurisdictions, and there are many of those, too, may be aligned with 2016 or 2013, even the 2010 version of ASHRAE 90.1. In jurisdictions like Massachusetts, which have taken a very proactive stance on decarbonization and climate action with the Climate Action Plan, that quantifies reductions from the built environment and 2050 net zero goals, these jurisdictions have adopted advanced energy codes. And Massachusetts has really taken a leading role in advancing energy codes by implementing ASHRAE 90.1, 2019, and as of July of this year, they will have what is known as the Specialized Stretch Energy Code, which layers additional requirements on top of the ASHRAE 90.1, 2019 base code.
Some of these concepts are, frankly, not very thoroughly adopted in today's best practice. So these are, these are new concepts to us, and we've been at the leading edge of sustainable development. One concept is the thermal energy demand intensity metric, which regulates the amount of heating and cooling energy required. It looks kinda, sorta like Passive House. You may have heard of the Passive House standard. Passive House actually started in the United States. It's a, it's a misconception that it started in Germany, but it was formalized in Germany. And Passive House certification is now required for multifamily buildings over 12,000 sq ft in Massachusetts. And what that will mean is much more heavily insulated walls, up to R-40, for example, better performing windows. Triple pane is pretty standard in Passive House with a R-5 insulation level.
It would also mean advanced heat recovery, so different heat recovery systems, lower mechanical systems. The idea of Passive House is very little mechanical energy and heavy investment in the facade tightness and the facade insulation level. Much, much further in both directions than today's codes require. It also encourages the use of all-electric heating and cooling for hot water, and gas systems must be pre-wired for future electric systems and have solar. And then there, there's another requirement on EV charging. 20% of residential and business parking spaces should be wired for electric vehicle charging. So all of these requirements will have impacts on the cost of new development, and they will have impacts on, I think, what gets built and how in states like Massachusetts that adopt these codes.
Yeah, so I think that there is a... I mean, for those of you who are interested, you know, and will hear about affordability, these energy code changes and things that are also being sort of added on in states like Massachusetts add to the simple burden of cost. And so to the extent that you see, the building industry talking about the frustrations they have with these types of regulations, it's largely because it's not providing enough of a return on capital relative to the incremental cost to justify the new construction. And so it's sort of, from my perspective, you know, sort of the other edge of the sword relative to affordability that the states also want.
It's like, you can't necessarily do all these things at the same time and think you're gonna get all your results in the right direction. So our view is that this is definitely going to be a constraint on new supply in many markets because of the nature of the cost implications of these things. And, you know, Ben and I and our teams have lots of conversations, particularly about whether or not it really makes sense, and we'll talk about the grid and whether there's actually enough electrical capacity for all electric everything, which is sort of what this is sort of pushing us into.
But whether it's the most efficient way to actually design a building, knowing that the cost of that electricity and the reality that much of that electricity is likely being generated by gas-fired generators somewhere on the grid on an incremental basis, puts onto a new development. In other words, if you had a very modest boiler that could create some hot water that we would use for those very cold days in the wintertime, in a market like Boston or a market like New York City, you could probably have a much more efficient mechanical system, and it would be a less expensive mechanical system. And it would probably be net in terms of the overall use of energy, in terms of where it's being produced, a more efficient and less carbon-centric way to build a building.
But the regulations are sort of pushing everyone to saying: Well, you cannot use any gas systems, you know, in a new construction, which is, you know, counterproductive to that.
So back to building performance standards. We have, in our jurisdictions where we operate, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle, passed building performance standards. There are many other jurisdictions that have committed to the passage of building performance standards, that have not yet implemented them. I would suggest that many of these jurisdictions are delayed in their implementation, because there's a lot more stakeholder engagement and planning that needs to go into this, that I think a lot of these jurisdictions anticipated when they committed to setting the targets or establishing the BPS before Earth Day of 2024, which was what many of these jurisdictions had committed to.
Ben, we had one of the questions we've gotten so far is whether or not these regulations are for all buildings or just new buildings. And I think you can answer that question pretty quickly.
Yeah, all buildings. I think what's interesting is cities like Cambridge, where they have a BPS, they're trying to do... and Boston's exploring the same idea. Any new development that comes along, say, past 2025, 2026, will need to meet a net zero requirement that'll align with this BPS. So they're basically going to take the BPS and say: This is now a net zero BPS, so you're going to be treated like you're allowed zero emissions, day one, for new development in these jurisdictions. And so they're going to try to align their net zero requirements with their building performance standard. But to answer your question, it's these regulations are targeting existing buildings.
So for our portfolio in New York, what I'm trying to show here is the greenhouse gas emissions intensity in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per square feet, which is the metric that is typically used for carbon intensity. That's what Local Law 97 uses. I'm showing a few things here. First, the gray bar, 2008, is what our intensity was for the buildings we owned in New York at the time. Where the green bars are the average intensity for our portfolio in New York, given the emissions factors, that's a unit that's per kilowatt hour or megawatt hour that you apply to your total consumption to get your carbon intensity.
So our using those emissions factors and our energy consumption, we can estimate our emissions intensity in 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027, looking at our portfolio. And this is our picture at the moment of our carbon intensity across our New York portfolio, compared to the emissions cap through the first performance period and second performance period in New York. So that's the dashed black line. And so we do have some assets that are blended into this average. They're slightly above the cap in 2030, like 601 Lexington Avenue, which I'll talk about, where we're implementing some projects that I believe will bring them into compliance. But even if we fall short, the exposure that we have is relatively minor, on the order of $0.12 a foot per year.
So this is not the NOI killer for a portfolio like BXP's, that is premier workplace, that some have assumed. Anything to add on New York, Doug?
No, I just would say that each building has its own individual challenges or opportunities, and we look at each building on a sort of individual basis to sort of figure out what the right approach would be for those buildings. And sort of, again, going back, because we've been investing in these buildings on a continual basis for decades, there are not significant major issues that we're having to address. We have some end-of-life equipment issues that we all recognize were there. And in the case, for example, of the General Motors Building in New York, we've replaced the chiller plant.
We knew that the chiller plant was going to have to be replaced at some point when we purchased the building, and it just so happens that the end of life put us in a position where we could have a dramatic reduction in the energy intensity of that building. But it was not a response to the regulation. It was a reality of, hey, this equipment can only run for so many years.
Shifting to Boston, same concept here. 2008, around 7 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per square feet. That's just north of 3 kg carbon dioxide equivalent today. And in this case, we have the ability to procure additionality renewable power, so we've modeled that in here. And that 11% that is additionality is modeled into our intensities. And through the application of the efficiency investments we've made, voluntary procurement of renewable power, we're under the BERDO caps through 2034. And one of the things here that is interesting is that we are using emissions factors that estimate a rate of grid decarbonization that anticipated offshore wind deliveries that may not occur, certainly not in the time frame people thought they would.
So if Massachusetts falls short on its renewable power delivery and our grid doesn't green at the rate it should, there's a real question mark here on how it impacts the exposure of property owners to regulations like BERDO. I should mention here, too, we've carved out our retail, that is not in here. It's separate asset class. It's something we're gonna have to deal with separately, and we are doing retro-commissioning of our retail here at the Prudential Center, where it's mostly concentrated this year. Anything to add, Doug, on BERDO? All right. So moving along, Doug had mentioned our GM Building investments and our mechanical modernization. This building kept me up at night, frankly. When I came in to BXP, it had an energy use intensity of 140.
It looked almost like a laboratory versus an office building compared to the rest of our portfolio. And since then, we've cut the use from the 140 range down to the mid-70s. And we've done that through a number of lighting improvements, building management system and controls upgrades, real-time energy performance management. We're using Measurabl asset optimization and Nantum, their tool from Prescriptive Data. And we also did a major investment in the central chiller plant, replacing old steam chillers with modern electric drive lines. That had a huge impact on energy intensity. So we cut our steam use significantly at this building, which had a remarkable impact. So that, that's a large part of what we've done.
I should also add that a few tenant spaces have turned, and tenant spaces turning has an impact, as well as, data center intensities have shifted from office to the cloud, and that has an impact as well on energy use at office buildings in a, in a positive way. The improved performance meant that we weren't subject to fines under Local Law 97, and this building has a D, currently on the, on the front. It has a letter grade under the New York Building Energy Grade regulation. That D is going to a B, hopefully an A someday. When we acquired the building, it had an ENERGY STAR score around 38, and today it's above 75, and earned the ENERGY STAR label for the first time in February 2024.
Huge team effort in New York to turn around the GM Building. Excuse me. All right, moving ahead. Another team effort in New York that's going quite well is the installation of water source heat pumps at 601 Lexington Avenue, under the Empire Building Challenge program. We worked with JB&B to design a fairly novel way to recover heat that was being ejected from the condenser water system during the winter months. So on the left is the before, and what it shows is a condenser water loop running north-south through the building that was attached to tenant supplemental cooling units. During the wintertime, these units would be ejecting heat from various higher, hotter uses in the building.
Maybe there's a lot of people in a conference room, or they're in the server closet with heavy equipment loads, or even in the interiors of buildings, the interior zones. They can get above temperature set point, during even the wintertime. So that heat was being ejected from the building through the cooling towers. Now we're adding a water source heat pump and a bypass valve that will recover that heat through, two water source heat pumps in the building, and then transfer that heat to the perimeter radiant systems, which means we'll use less steam in the building, and significantly less steam. Our early modeling indicates that we may cut steam here as much as 30%. So we are, very excited about this project and expect to have it fully commissioned around, February of 2025.
Just, just a sort of an interesting tidbit on this is that, so these water source heat pumps, there, there's a 45-week wait in order to get one. These are not complicated pieces of machinery. And so anybody who sort of has the perspective that, well, supply chain issues, particularly around the building industry, have all sort of dissipated, for whatever reason, it hasn't. My own, my own personal conjecture is it's these data centers that are being created across the country for, all of... And the amount of power that's needed and the amount of cooling that is needed, for, for these data centers are sucking up all the capacity for the manufacturers. 'Cause, you know, Trane, who manufactures one of these for us, is manufacturing those same kinds of machines for these data centers.
But it's still a significant challenge to actually procure the equipment that you need to do these types of projects.
Yeah. Absolutely. The these and transformers are number one and number two. We see this as a step towards full electrification of 601 Lexington in the future. And this is a partial electrification of this asset, and I am very bullish on partial electrification wherever it can be done, because it is far more cost-effective to partially electrify and significantly reduce emissions in the process, than fully electrify many of these assets, particularly large CBD buildings like this one here. It's 1.7 million ft in Midtown Manhattan. Corporate commitments. I've mentioned the importance of our clients, and we have seen a rapid uptick in entities with public net zero targets through communication with our clients.
Clients, we know this is the case, but also just public data, like, from groups like Net Zero Tracker, shows that both cities and companies over the last three years, give or take, have rapidly adopted net zero targets from 417 companies in 2021 up to 929 in 2023. And if you look across the list of our large clients, almost without exception, they have public energy and carbon commitments from Salesforce, Biogen, Google, Akamai, et cetera. And we're working with many of these clients, either through operating the buildings they control or providing them with data around their systems and how their buildings are using energy, or in some cases, working on renewable energy strategies and what we're doing around green power procurement.
We have a lot of communication, a lot more communication with these clients that have established energy and water targets, some of them long before 2021. One of the ways we want to accommodate clients that are looking for low-carbon real estate solutions, who have established goals, that have connected the dots to those goals and their real estate decisions, is by pioneering the net zero retrofit. So I'm going to share an example case where we brought forward three options: a green retrofit, a deep green retrofit, and a net zero retrofit. Some of you may remember, I introduced this concept during the last webinar. Since then, we've executed this project. The difference between a green retrofit and a deep green retrofit is a lot more façade improvement. Deep green typically means around a 40% reduction below baseline.
Net zero includes electrification of all the thermal systems, and in this case, we're looking at air handling units, typically rooftop, with some sort of VRF coil heat pump system. I do love heat pumps. And then we want to maximize site solar, all the generation we can do on site, on rooftops, garages, if we have them, surface parking, if that exists. 140 Kendrick was our first major net zero retrofit. It's a building complex in Needham, Massachusetts, of three buildings interconnected with a parking garage. We were getting back 106,000 sq ft in a white box condition, and we engaged with Wellington on this project to do our first net zero lease, for Building A, shown here with solar panels on the roof.
Included full thermal electrification of the rooftop system, so we cut the gas connection completely for the building, went fully electric. We added a bunch of solar, and we re-insulated the entire building façade and roof up to an R-30, R-40 level, respectively. The result and the targets were about a 40% reduction in energy use intensity, 1.4 MW of on-site solar and storage, 1.4 million kWh of annual production. We avoid, through the redevelopment of existing buildings, significant amount of embodied carbon. A lot of what I've talked about today is focused on operational carbon. The elephant in the room is the carbon associated with building materials, concrete and steel, primarily. If we can avoid replacing concrete and steel or adding new concrete and steel, we can save a lot of carbon.
In this case, we were able to avoid 23.4 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per square feet, that's very high on an intensity basis, by reusing practically everything, from the windows to the walls, foundations, and the roof structure. We recover on this project 90% of building heat through a technology called the Superblock, and 38%, we had a 38% reduction in indoor water use. All of this modeled going in, and we're working through measurement and verification now. The mantra on this project was build tight, ventilate right, energize with sunlight. What I think was particularly unique was stripping away all the interior drywall and insulating everything, and looking for, seals that needed replacement, any sort of leakage, any sort of discontinuous air barriers, adding air barrier in a lot of cases.
One kind of thing you don't think about is codes that are triggering façade improvement, like the new Specialized Opt-in Stretch Code, may actually be introducing a lot more embodied carbon than the operational savings that are presented on the back end, particularly if we have clean power supply. So, if you spec the wrong spray foam, for example, you can blow your embodied carbon up very substantially, to a point where the operational emissions reductions don't offset that embodied carbon that's been created through the development or redevelopment process. So just something to keep in mind. I think there's going to be a lot more consideration of whole building lifecycle carbon, inclusive of embodied and operational over the years ahead.
So Ben, comment number one is: You can't do this unless the building is vacant, right? This is a major renovation of a building, and if the building didn't have a tenant leaving and another tenant that was ready to come in, you couldn't do this. Second question is, and maybe you'll get to this, is: So did the equipment work that we ordered, and are we actually seeing... And did we see at the get-go, the kind of impacts that we thought we would see?
Yeah, I'll get to that in a second, Doug. I think you can't do efficient net zero renovation without some major tenant disruption, and having an empty building is probably where this kind of project only makes sense, for obvious reasons, you look at the picture. But I think that there are net zero approaches that can be made with central plant electrification that can be done in occupied buildings. However, you are using a lot more power if you're not able to make the building more efficient at the same time. And there's this term, beneficial electrification, and there are lots of electrification experts out there that will tell you that electrification includes efficiency upgrades and the decommissioning of gas-fired systems, and going fully electric.
So I think the best net zero demonstration projects will include major facade improvement and deep energy work that we're showing here. Just let me get to the M&V real quick. This is the combined solar and storage approach. We had the rooftop solar, the solar canopy on the garage, and then battery storage now. We've gone through this measurement and verification process. Through measurement and verification, what I'm showing here is the greenish-blue lines are the building load, and the yellow lines are the solar production on site. We're producing 40% more energy on site than we're consuming through the month of April, so this is very promising. But when we started this project, the...
We noticed that the peak demands were much higher than we thought, and that was because we had maintained electric resistance reheat coils in terminal units. Very typical to have this type of system in a suburban office building. We had thought that the VRF system would carry most of the morning warm-up heating load, and it wasn't. Being that the terminal boxes in the space were having to work a lot harder, moving more air, heating more air, that coil was running 100% for hours. And when you have dozens of toasters, essentially, hanging from the ceiling, running in the morning, it blows up your EUI.
So we learned a lot about integration of heat pumps and the integration of energy recovery units, the replacements for the rooftop units, and how they should be programmed and sequenced with the terminal units in the space to optimize energy use. So Doug, I think, to your point, we're—we've ironed out a lot of the initial issues through a post-commissioning measurement and verification process, and engagement with our facilities team, which has done a tremendous job, and the engineer of record, who's been working on this with us. 290 Binney is a 16-story, 570,000 sq ft laboratory/office life science property. It's currently under construction. I believe they're up to the fifth floor with structural steel right now in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
It's 100% pre-leased by AstraZeneca, with initial occupancy expected in April 2026. We're targeting LEED BD+C platinum for the core and shell, and we'll have a Commercial Interiors platinum certification as well. We made a tremendous effort here to reduce any carbon emissions from this project, and the first thing we aspired to do was to eliminate on-site fossil fuel combustion. So this is our first building, our first life science building, without any gas combustion on site that we've developed. And we do have a steam connection at the street for peak heating, which allows us to do the vast majority of our heating and cooling with a heat pump plant and heat recovery chillers in the building. This is particularly challenging for a laboratory life science asset, because they're designed for 12 air changes per hour.
In this case, that's what the market is in, in Kendall Square. So we had to have the centralized heat pump plant on the roof, a lot of heat recovery from the exhaust systems, the Konvekta system, and then heat recovery chillers in the backup steam for the peak heating demands. And that gave us what I would call the best optimization of resilience and energy performance, and decarbonization that we could achieve for a life science project, given today's technology. So we're very proud of this building and have a great client with AstraZeneca, who is partnering with us through the process. 343 Madison Avenue is a future development that is designed to be a 49-story, 900,000 sq ft office tower in Midtown Manhattan, with ground floor retail.
Here, we're targeting LEED version 4 platinum, and we have all-electric mechanical system with air source heat pumps for heating and cooling, all DOAS terminal units throughout the building, dedicated outside air system, so 100% fresh air being delivered for ventilation, and then hydronic systems for heating and cooling throughout the building. We have looked at Passive House feasibility for this asset, and we are very focused on both the operational and embodied carbon, so-called full life cycle, building life cycle, whole building carbon, if you will. A lot of effort has been made here to drive down the energy use intensity. Today, we're modeling out at around 43 kBtu/ sq ft. So to put that in perspective, I shared the energy code graph earlier. This building, in the 1990s, might have had an EUI closer to 90 or 80.
And today, we're pushing the boundary of what we can do at 43 kBtu/sq ft. A lot of that comes from the mechanical system, the DOAS system, optimized cooling plant staging, and better heat pump efficiency. And then, an excellent building façade. So a lot of investment in the glazing and reducing the window wall ratio to maximize the thermal performance of the façade. So when comparing 343 Madison to similar buildings, two electric buildings, buildings A and B, shown here, other buildings of similar size, older vintage in New York....
In the following six bars, and then the CBECS 2018, which is the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey, that is essentially the benchmark that Portfolio Manager uses to establish ENERGY STAR scores, and then New York City's Local Law 97 benchmarking data, which gives you public record data on how other similar buildings are performing. You can see that 343 Madison outperforms similar buildings being built today, all electric, as well as existing buildings in service and benchmarks that we're comparing against in New York City. As I mentioned, we're focused on embodied carbon. We've been doing life cycle assessment on all new developments now as a requirement.
To give you a sense of 343 Madison Avenue and the magnitude of carbon emissions, we estimate that the core and shell would be associated with around 40,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The vast majority of that is from the production of those materials, as shown in the graph on the left. On the right, you see the full 46.7 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent as the carbon intensity, and 81% of that's in the structure. So there are some obviously some impacts from the glass and the miscellaneous metals associated with the enclosure and some in the foundations. But if you look at it, it's the steel and the concrete associated with the structure that are the hot spots. And this is how we evaluate hot spots. What can we do about structural concrete?
What can we do about structural steel? How do we source better materials, lower carbon materials? And we see some levers we can pull. So we've been starting to integrate performance-based specifications into all of our new developments, where we're providing some flexibility on what materials are provided, and giving our, our GCs and their subs an opportunity to present to us lower carbon, embodied carbon solutions. And we're working closely with our designers to influence and emphasize the importance of low carbon materials to BXP. And we found, roughly, that we could achieve about a 15% overall reduction without any premium costs.
I think we're all looking for the silver bullet, the breakthrough on concrete, that's going to get us from a 30% savings using slag and fly ash, other SCMs on the concrete mix, down to something like a 70% or 80% or 90% reduction, and that's one of the reasons we're working with EIP, who has a portfolio company, Sublime, that's very exciting in this area, that is not yet fully commercializing green concrete, but is working hard on it and making progress. All right, I'm gonna try to wrap up here with some of the challenges and opportunities in a low carbon economy. So first, I'll start with the challenges, and I think I spoke about this already a little bit today.
Electrification of thermal heating, particularly in existing CB offices, life science and residential assets, is a challenge. It's a challenge because it's very different than the work we've done on energy conservation, where there was a sound economic business case to invest in conservation, to conserve power. I would argue, too, as the buying of green power, there's often a decent business case to for doing that. To rip and replace systems, modify systems, disrupt tenants is hugely impactful and costly. And so we are going to look for opportunistic ways to do partial electrification, and we'll continue to push on this. But today, a lot of the 5% of our total emissions that are locked in from gas-fired boiler plants are...
Those are going to be addressed at end of useful life, and we hope that we'll figure out, between now and then, some breakthroughs to underwrite those investments, perhaps with a client. Perhaps it's through another program that incentivizes those kinds of retrofits. But right now, the order of magnitude of the cost is incredibly high. A second challenge is balancing energy intensity, thermal comfort, and human health. So one thing you can do that has a huge impact on energy intensity is shut off the ventilation, but healthy buildings need to breathe. So we like our buildings breathing. We like good indoor air quality. We monitor indoor air quality using 500 sensors across our portfolio at 40 buildings to check carbon dioxide concentration and fine particulate, PM2.5.
We want to make sure that we're providing optimal ventilation, controlling CO2, controlling contaminants, while also operating efficiently. And that's a dance. That's really a delicate dance that we're doing, using monitoring data in some cases, to make sure we're ventilating appropriately and trying to turn down ventilation where we're over-ventilating. Scope 3 emissions management and supply chain engagement are going to be a challenge. Client alignment. Do our clients share our goals? Are they, if they're behind their own meter, buying green power? Working with our clients to fit out their spaces to be modern and efficient or make renovations to their existing spaces, that's that is... We're doing some of that. It can always be done better.
Green grid decarbonization, I mentioned, has a huge impact on our carbon emissions, and whether or not the grid decarbonizes at a faster or slower rate, will impact the emissions associated with the built environment. And we're doing a lot of engagement with utilities and cities to try to work on grid modernization. In fact, we had a meeting here in Boston this morning with the Green Ribbon Commission on this subject. Building materials, another major focus of ours. How can we work with industry to transform the manufacturing process for concrete and steel? I... Boston Properties, BXP, is not going to solve this on our own.... I believe that's the first time I said Boston Properties, Laura. BXP is not gonna solve this on our own, so it's gonna require an industry coalition.
It's gonna require groups like the Urban Land Institute and groups like Energy Impact Partners, to move the industry and move the supply chain towards greener concrete and steel. Navigating new energy codes and disclosure requirements, including the specialized opt-in code in Massachusetts, and disclosure requirements like SB 253 and 261 in California, and the SEC's climate disclosure requirements. All this is going to require more engagement with accounting and auditors, and a lot of preparation from our sustainability team, working hand in hand with our teams across the country. EV charging strategy, technology, infrastructure. We wanna make sure that we are deploying enough charging stations, but not overbuilding charging stations and unnecessarily spending CapEx.
So today, we have 500 EV charging stations, and we're working on forming partnerships with different groups to leverage incentives and to reduce the unit cost, the cost per port, of our EV charging portfolio. But 500 today— Yes, yes, Doug?
There's a sort of peculiar sort of perspective that certain people have in the leasing community, and you mean brokers or tenant reps, or even our people, that office building owners should simply supply free gas and build gas stations for their customers. Which I have a hard time with, particularly 'cause there's not enough gas being pumped out of these chargers to actually make them even feasible on an operating basis. So there— the solution associated with chargers needs to be a broad governmental solution, not a privatization on an individual building by building basis.
Yeah. Yeah, it seems like this, there's new news on EV charging every week. How many people are gonna buy EVs, and how should we forecast EV adoption? That's something we're grappling with. The NEVI incentives from the government, that program, and the billions that have been allocated to states, how will those be distributed? What will that mean for supercharging capacity, and will people just prefer to access a Level 3 versus a Level 2 at work? And what's going to be the preference for charging at work versus charging at home, and what's the sweet spot? How much charging should we need? So we wanna right time it, and we wanna phase it in, and we wanna meet the market and meet demand, but we don't wanna proactively become a gas station, I think, to your point, Doug.
It's also. I would just comment briefly on these policies that require 25% of all spaces to have EV charging. That's a tremendous amount of standby power and capacity that we're gonna be allocating for systems that are not being used. That is going to become more critical as we electrify more of the environment and building heating and moving into the wintertime. So I think we need to be smart about how much capacity we reserve for EV charging, and try to rightsize that solution.
The grids in the cities can support that now, Ben.
Right. And why, why would you wanna add a peak demand on top of a peak demand at an office building, where you could charge overnight when there's excess supply, there's surplus, right? So it's better to charge overnight. It's not gonna happen at the workplace. Opportunities. So on the positive side here, Doug, continuing to implement cost-effective energy and water conservation measures. Participating in the development of distributed energy resources on and off site. I think the work that we've done to add almost 10 MW of solar PV on site is tremendous. I think we could be doing more and exploring more options to add solar. The incentives are quite good. I think the Inflation Reduction Act and the transferability of tax credits opens up some opportunities for REITs and simplifies some of the development process.
That is very exciting for our industry. The integration of ground source heat pumps systems on new development and major renovations. This also got a huge boost from the Inflation Reduction Act, with large tax credits associated with ground source heat pumps. A ground source heat pump is a favorable solution for BXP because the coefficient of performance of ground source heat pumps is better than air source heat pumps, so you can more efficiently heat and cool buildings with a ground source system, provided a number of conditions are met: geotechnical conditions, land availability. There's a lot that goes into this, including the supply chain, which is maturing here in the United States. But a very exciting area for exploration, and we've been considering ground source heat pumps on several conceptual designs. Advancing and delivering low embodied carbon projects.
We wanna, we wanna focus on redevelopment of existing buildings. We wanna continue to engage with industry on concrete, steel, and even mass timber technology. We have, we have a session this week, a learning session on, on mass timber, to get some updates on what's happening, and we're excited about developments with mass timber across different asset classes: commercial, retail, and residential. And then climate technology innovation deployment. Continuing our partnership with EIP, we've made a second investment with them in beginning of 2024, and we're, we're thrilled with that relationship and plan to continue to dig in. So in summary, BXP is a leader in sustainability. Our leadership is really the result of collective action and commitment across the company, starting with our interest in conserving energy expenses.
BXP's continued leadership and measurable progress are the result of a long-standing commitment to sustainable development and operations, which has meant increasing ambition and stakeholder engagement, and that's a large part of my job. Decarbonization and transition risk management efforts are important aspects of BXP's business strategy and alignment with our key stakeholders, including many of you that are joining us today. We sincerely appreciate your interest in BXP and our sustainability program. Thank you.
So Ben, there's—I think most of the questions that we got, I think, were answered. There's one that I think we may have answered, but I'll ask it anyway, 'cause it was phrased slightly differently, which is: What tools or solutions are we using to help create portfolio-level deep carbon roadmaps at scale across the portfolio?
A lot of spreadsheets. We do some of the work in Portfolio Manager and with Measurabl, but a lot of spreadsheets. We have a great team. We have deep resources across the organization and our property management team, as well as our sustainability team. We've been carefully modeling decarbonization plans for several years, looking for strategies. But I'd say Measurabl is our most useful tool for tracking what we're doing in terms of energy conservation, tracking carbon intensities, tracking projects, and also planning projects and what we may do. One other thing I would mention, too, is the effort to retro-commission assets. I might have stated that too simply. When we do retro-commissioning of, say, 9 million sq ft last year, we include net zero planning in that scope of work.
So as we're retro-commissioning assets, we're also imagining what improvements and approximating costs of those improvements we would have to make to conduct full electrification or make facade improvements. And the numbers we've seen coming back from some of that have caused me to look at more optimistically towards hybrid approaches, like what we're doing at 601 Lexington Avenue in the near term. And that's what we're gonna continue to do. So I would just say retro-commissioning does include some of our net zero road mapping and planning, along with our data management tracking through Measurabl and proprietary spreadsheets.
We got one other question a minute ago that I'll just answer briefly. It was basically, you know, can you use AI in some way, shape, or form to help figuring out the net zero energy buildings? And what I would say is, AI in the commercial real estate industry has got a long way to go, because the data points are relatively small. But the tools that Ben described, Measurabl, Nantum, a couple of others, are trying to forecast based upon lots of different variables, what our buildings should do and how we might find opportunities to tinker with the building operations, ways that will reduce our energy, AKA, if it's really humid outside, should our morning warm-up be starting earlier or later in the day?
Or, excuse me, cool, cool, cool down, start earlier or later in the day, things like that. So I would say that it's in its infancy, relative to the real estate industry, and it's really not about large language models. It's about processing the zillions of data points that we have around temperature, around electrical consumption, around humidity, around building occupancy, around the various, you know, sunlight during the day, and ultimately, what the cost of the power is, depending upon the utility that's charging us and where their peak periods are. So it's a little bit less AI than it is sort of an automation exercise at the moment.
But hopefully, over time, there'll be enough, there'll be enough data, enough variables, where someone will come up with a, an AI-generated tool as opposed to an automated tool.
Hey, Doug, can I just offer one example? 'Cause I agree with you. A lot of what we've seen packaged as AI is really just machine learning and algorithms with AI on the label. But there's—I think, and we've all witnessed the rollout of GPT-4o this week. Omni model is a remarkable advancement that gives me a really bullish feeling on the application of AI for building performance. I think it's inevitable. I think the only products that are gonna succeed will have AI integrated, but it's gonna take time. One use case that we are interested in right now is around this vast amount of indoor air quality data we've been collecting that's accessible in CSV files.
So we can take a CSV file and load it into an AI engine and get it to plot and come up with quan-- like, qualitative findings around correlations between CO2 concentration and occupancy. That, that's work that would have taken months with analysts, that I think can be done quite effectively with an LLM that's trained appropriately. I think there are very large concerns around hallucinations and incorrect outcomes, but my feeling is, if you can iterate and have good people checking the results, these tools are gonna be-- these AI tools are gonna be very helpful for those kinds of exercises.
Great. All right. Well, thanks, everybody, for taking the time to listen to us today, and we'll talk to you again, probably around this time next year. Thanks.