Every year, California’s commercial and apartment buildings burn through 109 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, guzzle 240 billion gallons of water, and release 23 million metric tons of carbon — and until now, almost none of that was easy for the public to see in one place.

That changed on May 28, when Measurabl and U.S. Green Building Council of California (UCGBC California) launched the California Building Performance Pulse, a free public dashboard that tracks how the state’s commercial and multifamily buildings perform on energy, carbon, and water. It covers more than 1.3 billion square feet of floor space across six years of utility data, one of the largest public windows into California building performance yet, and lets anyone compare buildings by city, property type, floor area, and year built.

Data for Decision-Making

The California Air Resources Board attributes roughly a quarter of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to residential and commercial buildings once electricity use, on-site fuel combustion, and refrigerant leaks are counted together. On-site fossil gas combustion alone accounts for about 10 percent of the statewide total, and that slice has proven far harder to shrink than emissions from electricity or transportation.

The problem is partly one of visibility. Benchmarking laws have multiplied. California requires owners of larger commercial and multifamily buildings to report energy use annually under state law, and dozens of municipal ordinances layer on top, but the resulting data has been scattered, inconsistent, and hard for owners or the public to act on.

As USGBC California has noted in its compliance guidance, benchmarking by itself doesn’t cut emissions; owners have to act on what the numbers reveal. A building owner who can’t see how their property stacks up against similar ones has little basis for deciding what to fix first.

The Pulse dashboard is designed to close that gap, displaying median annual performance, percentile distributions, year-over-year trends, and geographic patterns across building types including office, multifamily, industrial, hospitality, and retail. The aim, USGBC California CEO Ben Stapleton said when announcing the tool, is to make energy, carbon, and water insights more visible and usable for the owners, operators, and policymakers working to improve performance and strengthen resilience across the state.

The Pulse is powered by Measurabl’s larger data infrastructure, which the company says tracks sustainability data across more than 23 billion square feet in 90-plus countries; the California dataset grows as more owners add their buildings.

A Hard Look at Water Usage

What sets the Pulse apart is water. Measurabl describes it as the only public California dashboard to combine energy, carbon, and water in a single platform. Water has long been the neglected leg of the building-performance stool. Most benchmarking tools and ordinances were built around energy and emissions first.

That matters because water intensity varies enormously by building type. Measurabl reports that in its dataset, hotels use roughly 7 to 10 times more water per square foot than offices. Federal benchmarking data points the same direction: the EPA ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager shows hotels and hospitals exceed 50 gallons per square foot per year, while a typical office building uses closer to 13 to 14 gallons.

A benchmark that treats every building the same misses that an underperforming hotel and an underperforming office are different problems at very different scales.

Median water use intensity by property type

Property type Approx. water use intensity (gal/sq ft/yr)

Senior care	~60
Hospitals	>50
Hotels	>50
Office	~13–14

Source: EPA ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager

California’s water picture also makes the timing important. The state began the 2026 water year in unusually good shape — a wet winter pushed it out of drought entirely for the first time in 25 years by mid-January, according to the Governor’s office. But hydrologists at the California WaterBlog caution that a single wet season doesn’t resolve the state’s structural water stress, and the effects of groundwater and Colorado River overdraft will linger for years. Investments in water efficiency can pay off across both wet years and the dry ones that inevitably follow.

The Dashboard Arrives as Rules Tighten

The dashboard lands at a regulatory inflection point. Under Senate Bill 48, the California Energy Commission is developing a statewide strategy for using benchmarking data to manage building energy use and emissions, with a report due to the legislature in 2026. In February, USGBC California released model building performance standard policy guidance to help cities and counties adopt consistent rules. Building performance standards typically set emissions or efficiency targets that ratchet down over time, with financial penalties for missing them.

For owners, that means the era of simply reporting data is giving way to one when they must meet efficiency targets. Knowing how a building’s performance compares — and which peers are doing better — is the starting point for prioritizing retrofits before compliance deadlines arrive.

At launch, the dataset reflects buildings whose owners participate, and much benchmarking data is self-entered rather than independently verified. A public dashboard is a meaningful step toward transparency, not a complete or audited census of every building in the state.

What You Can Do

• If you own or manage a building: Look up how your property type and city perform on the Pulse, then check your own energy and water use against the median. The gap between you and the top quartile is your retrofit roadmap.
• Don’t ignore water: Especially for hotels, hospitals, multifamily, and senior care, water efficiency is often a lower-cost win than energy retrofits. Towel-and-linen reuse, efficient fixtures, and leak monitoring add up quickly in high-intensity buildings.
• Get ahead of the standards: With SB 48 and local building performance standards advancing, treat current benchmarking as preparation for future targets rather than a box to check. Organizing your utility data now makes later compliance far less painful.
• If you’re a tenant or resident: Ask building management how the property benchmarks and whether efficiency upgrades are planned. Demand from occupants is a real driver of building investment.
• If you set policy: Public, comparable performance data is the foundation for credible standards. Tools like the Pulse make it easier to design targets grounded in data about how buildings perform rather than on estimates.

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