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Houston is taking the lead among the world's largest cities in reducing the energy consumption of city buildings and lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Today Houston became the first C40 city in the United States to announce a comprehensive building retrofit project under the Clinton Climate Initiative's Building Retrofit Program. C40 is a group of the world's largest cities committed to tackling climate change.

At their third annual meeting in Seoul, South Korea last week, the C40 cities set a common goal of transforming themselves into low-carbon cities. They pledged to achieve this goal by cutting greenhouse gas emissions to the largest extent possible, by adapting themselves to the unavoidable climate change consequences, by making cities less vulnerable to climate change, and by enhancing cities' capacity for remediation.

The William J. Clinton Foundation launched the Clinton Climate Initiative in August 2006 to create and advance solutions to the core issues driving climate change. The CCI Building Retrofit program announced in May 2007 brings together many of the world's largest cities, energy service firms and financial institutions in an effort to reduce energy consumption in existing buildings.

To achieve this goal, Houston has awarded a $9.6 million performance contract involving seven of the city's 271 buildings to TAC by Schneider Electric, the building management and energy services division of Schneider Electric.

TAC will implement energy conservation measures at these city facilities to improve building efficiency and says the money saved in utility costs will pay for the upgrades. As a part of the agreement with the city of Houston, TAC will guarantee the amount of savings and agrees to pay the difference if that amount is not realized.

"Buildings are responsible for more than 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in most cities," Issa Dadoush, general services director for the city of Houston, "so retrofitting our facilities with more energy-efficient products and technologies is an important way we can reduce both energy use and greenhouse gas emissions."

In total, the city of Houston has selected 271 buildings, containing 11 million square feet, from high-rise offices to single story structures, that are candidates for performance contracting. For the first phase of this project, TAC will perform energy audits on seven Houston municipal buildings containing 1.2 million square feet.

The retrofits TAC completes in a typical performance contract can lower energy use from 20 to 30 percent, so it is possible that the city of Houston could lower its emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide by up to 1,647 tons. This is equal to taking 1,014 cars off the roads or planting 1,498 acres of trees, TAC estimates.

In April, TAC took on a similar task for the city of Abilene, Texas, implementing $9 million in facility enhancements designed to improve operations, security, comfort and efficiency at 34 city buildings.