Large-building energy: emissions and ratings by community area
Chicago’s Energy Benchmarking Ordinance requires buildings of 50,000 square feet or larger to report their energy use each year. This map shows, for those large buildings, the median greenhouse-gas intensity and the median Chicago Energy Rating in each community area. Switch between the two views and the reporting year, or click any community area for the buildings behind the number.
How to read this map
This is a large-building map, not a neighborhood-emissions map. Only buildings of 50,000 sq ft or more are covered by the ordinance, so a community area’s value reflects its large offices, apartment towers, schools, and hospitals — not its houses, its streets, or its total carbon footprint. Coverage varies enormously: the Loop has hundreds of covered buildings, while some community areas have only a handful. Community areas with fewer than 15 measured buildings in a year are shown as “insufficient data,” and the drawer always names how many buildings sit behind a figure.
GHG intensity is the median greenhouse-gas intensity — kilograms of CO₂e per square foot — of a community area’s covered buildings. Warmer means more GHG-intensive per square foot. Energy rating is the median Chicago Energy Rating, a 0-to-4-star score the City assigns from each building’s benchmarking data; greener means higher-rated (more efficient). Both are medians, so one very large or very inefficient building does not swing the whole area.
Source: City of Chicago — Chicago Energy Benchmarking (open data), by reporting year. The map offers reporting years 2019–2023 and defaults to 2023, the most recent complete year (buildings report the prior calendar year each spring). A building is counted in a year only if it actually reported an energy figure. See methodology for the ≥50,000 sq ft coverage rule, the median definitions, and the suppression threshold.