Fighting climate change is a centerpiece of the Biden Administration, a point that the president emphasized with a 2021 executive order to convert all government to carbon-neutral by 2050 and federal buildings by 2045.
The administration’s belief is that if the federal government practices what it preaches, private facilities and other municipal and state governments will follow suit with their buildings. The Washington Post recently described the government’s efforts to achieve that goal in a long article through the General Services Administration (GSA), one of the largest possessors of land in the country.
The GSA manages nearly 8,400 buildings across the country and spends more than $630 billion on goods and services annually, according to The Post. A billion dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act is targeted to retrofitting more than 100 federal facilities to all-electric or net-zero emissions operations.
Two of the projects The Post evaluated was the Denver Federal Center, the largest collection of federal buildings outside of the Washington D.C. area, where a retrofit of heat pumps and solar panels is projected to save more than $2 million on energy costs.
The GSA is also retrofitting the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, which is the fourth-largest federal building in the country and second largest after the Pentagon. GSA is spending $13.5 million to electrify the building with projects that will cut energy costs by more than $6 million a year and save 35 million gallons of water annually.
Dave Lubach is the executive editor of the facility market.
