In response to mounting uncertainty over the future of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star Portfolio Manager, Cambio, an AI-driven commercial real estate operations platform, has launched Cambio Vault, a free alternative to EPA’s building benchmarking tool.
This move comes after recent reports raised serious concerns that the longstanding national repository for building energy data may soon be defunded or dismantled, putting at risk the data and reporting capabilities relied upon by thousands of commercial real estate owners and operators nationwide. Energy Star is currently used to benchmark half a million buildings and last year was credited with helping businesses avoid an estimated $14 billion in energy costs.
“Cambio is stepping up to fill the gap,” said Stephanie Grayson, co-founder and co-CEO of Cambio. “We’re proud to do our part during these uncertain times and offer a free, enterprise-grade alternative to Portfolio Manager. The launch of Cambio Vault honors our commitment to support the real estate industry with data empowerment. Cambio Vault ensures that the market can safeguard the data it needs to undertake critical benchmarking, reporting and retrofitting processes — without disruption or risk of data loss.”
Started in 1992, the Energy Star program enables property owners to measure the energy performance of their buildings, while helping them comply with state and local energy benchmarking ordinances that require the use of Portfolio Manager.
Cambio Vault integrates seamlessly with ESPM, enabling clients to push and pull building energy data for enhanced dashboard analytics, reporting and retrofit insights. Beyond energy performance data, Cambio’s AI algorithms ingest building characteristics like age, type, location and HVAC type via large language models (LLMs) to generate retrofit recommendations.
Key capabilities of Cambio Vault include secure data storage and historical record keeping, ongoing synchronization with ESPM to maintain the data backup, automated building-level energy and emissions tracking, visual dashboards and advanced analytics for performance insights and compliance-ready outputs for local benchmarking ordinances and ESG frameworks.
