Building Benchmarking
Learn about Surrey's involvement in Building Benchmark BC.
The City of Surrey is continually working on ways to reduce the amount of carbon pollution produced by our buildings.
Buildings are responsible for 42% of the carbon pollution in Surrey. Understanding how our buildings use energy is an important step to figuring out how best to reduce that pollution.
Surrey’s Climate Change Action Strategy (CCAS) sets a target for all operational GHG emissions from existing buildings to be eliminated by 2050, in support of the City’s commitment to achieve net-zero community-wide emissions by 2050. The CCAS identifies the actions needed to achieve this target, including developing a comprehensive existing buildings strategy for resilient, zero-carbon building retrofits.
Building benchmarking will be key to eliminating carbon pollution from existing buildings, both for the City and building owners and managers.
What is building benchmarking?
Building energy and emissions benchmarking is the process of monitoring a building’s energy consumption and carbon pollution over time and comparing them to similar buildings to better understand how the building is performing.
This provides building owners, managers, and occupants, and in some cases government staff, information and insights to identify potential problem areas and focus efforts and resources on the best interventions to become more efficient, less costly, and less polluting.
Building Benchmark BC
In 2019, City of Surrey became a founding member of Building Benchmark BC, a voluntary program that helps us better understand the climate impacts of large buildings and develop effective ways to address them. The program supports building owners and managers in reporting their building’s energy data and provides a detailed performance scorecard with insights for improvements.
In Year 4 of the program, over 1,300 buildings participated, representing over 13.9 million square meters of floorspace. Learn more about Year 4’s successes in the Building Benchmark BC Annual Report.
Building Benchmark BC is made possible by government and utility partners and administered by the OPEN Green Building Society. Learn more about the program’s benefits and how to join:
Our progress
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In 2023, over 100 buildings in Surrey participated in the Building Benchmark BC program including over 60 municipal facilities.
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In 2024, we want to expand the number of participating municipal facilities to 80 buildings and increase the participation of privately-owned buildings.
You can also interact with the Building Benchmark BC database to learn how hundreds of buildings in the lower mainland perform on various energy and carbon metrics.