(a) By December 31, 2010, each state department with responsibilities for the design and construction of public buildings and facilities shall benchmark every existing public building that is either larger than five thousand square feet or uses more than eight thousand kilowatt-hours of electricity or energy per year and shall use the benchmark as a basis for determining the State’s investment in improving the efficiency of its own building stock. Benchmarking shall be conducted using the ENERGY STAR portfolio management or equivalent tool. The chief energy officer of the Hawaii state energy office shall provide training to affected departments on the ENERGY STAR portfolio management or equivalent tool.

Terms Used In Hawaii Revised Statutes 196-30

  • Contract: A legal written agreement that becomes binding when signed.
  • Electricity: means all electrical energy produced by combustion of any fuel, or generated or produced using wind, the sun, geothermal heat, ocean water, falling water, currents, and waves, or any other source. See Hawaii Revised Statutes 196-2
  • Energy: means work or heat that is, or may be, produced from any fuel or source whatsoever. See Hawaii Revised Statutes 196-2
  • ENERGY STAR: means a labeling program introduced by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1992 as a voluntary labeling program designed to identify and promote energy-efficient products, in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. See Hawaii Revised Statutes 196-11
  • Renewable energy: means energy produced by solar, energy conserved by passive solar design/daylighting, ocean thermal, wind, wave, geothermal, waste-to-energy, or biomass power. See Hawaii Revised Statutes 196-11
  • Retro-commissioning: means a quality-oriented process, which takes place after systems have been placed in operation, for achieving, verifying, and documenting that the performance of facilities, systems, and assemblies perform as closely as possible to defined performance criteria, with regards to energy conservation design strategies and the energy performance of buildings. See Hawaii Revised Statutes 196-11
(b) Public buildings shall be retro-commissioned no less often than every five years. The chief energy officer of the Hawaii state energy office shall establish retro-commissioning guidelines by January 1, 2010.
(c) Departments may enter into energy savings performance contracts with a third party to cover the capital costs of energy-efficiency measures and distributed generation provided the terms of the energy savings performance contracts conform to the benchmark standard. The comptroller may review and exempt specific projects as appropriate to take into account cost-effectiveness.

Energy savings performance contracts shall be executed according to state guidelines issued by the comptroller, and the contracts shall be reviewed by the comptroller. To expedite energy savings performance contracting for public buildings, the department of accounting and general services shall develop a master energy savings performance contracts agreement that any department may use to contract with an energy savings performance contracts provider for energy-efficiency and renewable energy services.

(d) For existing public buildings that undergo a major retrofit or renovation, the department or departments responsible for design and construction shall make investments in efficiency; provided that the cost of the measures shall be recouped within twenty years.