WASHINGTON, DC-The Building Owners and Manager’s Association (BOMA) International has been awarded a 2012 ENERGY STAR Sustained Excellence Award from the US Environmental Protection Agency. The organization will be formally recognized by the government agency for its achievements in energy efficiency at an award awards ceremony on March 15, 2012—a date that also marks the 20th anniversary of ENERGY STAR.

BOMA, of course, is honored by EPA’s acknowledgement of its programs, BOMA International Chair Boyd R. Zoccola, who is also executive vice president of Hokanson Cos., says in a prepared statement. “BOMA has a proven commitment to reducing energy consumption through a voluntary marketplace, and this award is a testament to the success of programs like the 7-Point Challenge and BOMA STARS.”

The organization has enjoyed a close working relationship with EPA since 2007, when it worked with them to develop the BOMA Energy Efficiency Program, or BEEP as it is affectionately called in the commercial real estate community, says Lisa Prats, vice president of communications, marketing and meetings at BOMA, in an interview with GlobeSt.com.

“It was an education course to teach low and no cost ways to save energy in commercial buildings and continues to be phenomenal success,” she says. Since then, the two organizations have worked on numerous programs, all of which have as their theme benchmarking energy consumption. “It is only through benchmarking of data consumption can you improve or reduce energy consumption,” the spokeswoman adds.

More recent achievements include an expansion of BOMA’s Market Transformation Energy Plan, also known as the 7-Point Challenge, to which Zoccola referred. It calls on BOMA members and the commercial real estate industry to reduce the use of natural resources, non-renewable energy sources and waste production. Introduced in 2007, the 7-Point Challenge has been widely embraced throughout the marketplace and now represents more than three billion square feet of office space.

More recently, in January 2011, BOMA launched the BOMA STARS initiative to promote the benchmarking of energy consumption in commercial buildings through EPA’s Portfolio Manager and then sharing that data with BOMA’s Master Account.  Since its launch, more than 2,000 buildings have benchmarked and shared their data with BOMA International, an increase of more than 50%.

Also, in general, there has been a significant reduction of energy consumption in BOMA member buildings. Based on a sample set of 623 million square feet and an average building size of 250,000 square feet, almost 60% of properties that benchmarked and shared the data with BOMA have an ENERGY STAR rating of 75 or greater.