#greenfinancesf

I've been catching up on some reading and an application over the past few days, so I thought I'd recap a couple recent happenings and/or things I came across since the last post.

GreenFinanceSF

Just over a couple months ago, Mayor Lee relaunched the commercial arm of GreenFinanceSF, the PACE financing program first unveiled by the city in April 2010. GreenFinanceSF was initially available to commercial and residential properties before the FHFA effectively shut it down over concerns about lien priority. While the feasibility of residential PACE financing remains in limbo at least until California's lawsuit against Fannie and Freddie goes to trial late next April, San Francisco has refocused its efforts on making PACE financing available to the city's 16,000 commercial properties. (Commercial PACE sidesteps the question of lien priority by requiring consent from the property's other mortgage lender(s) prior to approval.)

GreenFinanceSF eschews preferred ESCOs and lenders, opting instead for an "open market" model designed to stimulate market competition among investors and contractors while delivering a broader array of options for participants. There is no exposure to the city as the $100M behind the program's Debt Service Reserve Fund is ARRA money (3). Meanwhile, prerequisites like the exclusion of properties with a history of default or bankruptcy and the stipulation that a property's combined debt (inclusive of the new financing) does not exceed its present value have been put in place to limit investor risk. 

Also of note as Proposition 13 returns to front-page headlines: GreenFinanceSF's voluntary special tax is possible thanks to "Mello-Roos" (a.k.a. 1982's Community Facilities District Act), which enabled the creation of CFDs by local government in order to install additional property taxes. Basically, it described a path for circumventing Prop 13.

San Francisco's Existing Commercial Building Energy Performance Ordinance

If GreenFinanceSF is the carrot, here is the stick: the ordinance passed this February requires that all existing non-residential buildings larger than 10,000 square feet regularly audit and disclose their energy use by 2014. Results must be benchmarked using EPA's Portfolio Manager tool -- PG&E is helping to streamline the process -- and shared with the city, tenants, and prospective buyers. The first report will be considered a "mulligan" and remain confidential, though I couldn't discern whether subsequent disclosures will be individual or aggregate (10). And here are some related questions:

Who is disclosing?  Generally the building owner is responsible for the disclosure, but that may require tenant data.  What is the process for obtaining that data?  Does the lease address the sharing of such data?  What about the utilities?  Can aggregated data be obtained from the utility to disclose?  California’s Assembly Bill 1103 of 2007 required electric and gas utilities to maintain customer data in a format compatible with Portfolio Manager and to provide that data upon the customer’s request.

What about data protection and confidentiality?  Along with the process of collecting data, impacted parties must consider the liabilities associated with that data.  Does a tenant have sensitive energy usage information?  Is the utility permitted to release customer data to a third party?  Does aggregating the data remedy the concerns?

What about context?  A building may appear to use a great deal of energy when in fact it is the nature of the tenant’s use that drives the energy use.  Perhaps they have 24 hour operations or their own server farm.  How is this information collected and when can it be used to explain building performance?

The city is also leading by example with a 10-year, $35M commitment to invest in EE public facility retrofits.

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