JBG Smith: L'Enfant Plaza East Building

The L’Enfant Plaza East Building was designed by a world-renowned architect in the late 1960s and construction was completed in 1971. The 12-story building features seven floors of office space leased primarily by federal government tenants, three floors of hotel space, and a ground floor lobby that serves both the office and hotel space.  After renewing GSA leases in 2010 and 2011, the building was required to achieve and maintain ENERGY STAR certification by scoring 75 or above on ENERGY STAR’s 1 to 100 energy performance rating scale. In 2011, JBG set a goal for the building to achieve LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance certification and in 2014 the company joined the Better Buildings Challenge, renewing its commitment to reduce portfolio-wide energy use by more than 20%.

The property team regularly tracked resource consumption metrics in both ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager and Ecova’s cloud based platform and initial ENERGY STAR scores for the building were in the mid 50’s. When the property established a baseline for energy performance in December 2010 with an ENERGY STAR score of 61, much of the lighting was inefficient T12s, the parking garage was severely over-lit with no controls, the building’s chillers were original and extremely inefficient Carrier 19EA 1000 Ton R-12 machines with an efficiency rating of .846 KW/Ton , and no VFDs (variable frequency drives) had been installed.  JBG recognized that the building’s 45-year-old systems presented a major opportunity for energy savings. They enlisted the help of ThinkEnergy Management to conduct comprehensive energy audits for both the office and hotel spaces. A major renovation of the office portion of the building was completed in 2012, including significant infrastructure and common area upgrades. The property team implemented more than 30 different low- and no-cost energy conservation measures (ECMs) that were identified through the audits. In addition, the building enrolled in a demand response program with Energy Curtailment Service from 2012 to 2015, which helped identify tactics to reduce energy consumption not only during emergency peak demand periods but also from day-to-day operations. The team also partnered with Mach Energy in late 2013 to add real-time energy management capabilities. As L’Enfant Plaza East’s owner, JBG remains committed to additional energy performance improvements to far exceed the company’s Better Buildings Challenge goal of 20% energy reduction by 2021.