The BEAMies
Each year ClearlyEnergy recognizes jurisdictions that have achieved record success and growth in their benchmarking and building performance standards programs. We use this as an opportunity to celebrate their wins and share best practices with our BEAM partners. Congratulations to all of our winners for 2025!
2025 BEAMie Winners
Highest Compliance Rate
The City of Cambridge, Massachusetts won a BEAMie for highest compliance rate, achieving 94.00% compliance, up from 92.00% the previous year when they also won the award. In their tenth year of reporting, Cambridge has built a strong foundation of compliance and engagement with building owners. As the City moves forward toward Building Performance Standard implementation with third party verification, baseline selection, and more, they have opened data submissions for corrections and additional reports for all previous years to ensure accurate historical data and prepare building owners for the next phase of their program.
Highest Compliance Rate
The City of Aspen, in partnership with the Community Office for Efficiency Resources (CORE), achieved an impressive compliance rate of 98% by the end of the 2025 reporting season. CORE is a non-profit organization that is responsible for administering the City’s benchmarking program. CORE’s diligent, hands-on approach to supporting building owners and managers through the benchmarking process allowed them to end the season with a robust building energy use dataset in BEAM. This data was then used to inform personalized recommendations for each building owner/manager. The City of Aspen and CORE’s success this past reporting season is a testament of their commitment to community engagement and effective small program management.
Creative Engagement Strategies
The City of Portland, Maine employed innovative engagement strategies to demonstrate the benefits of benchmarking for building owners covered under the City’s Energy and Water Use Benchmarking Ordinance. The City hosted a two-part webinar series. Part one highlighted incentive programs offered to businesses, manufacturers, and other non-residential facilities. Part two introduced building owners to free technical assistance available through BEAM for understanding energy usage and planning for cost-effective building upgrades - namely, the BEAM Enhanced Building Owner Portal and DOE Building Efficiency Targeting Tool For Energy Retrofits (BETTER) reports.
Creative Engagement Strategies
The Village of Oak Park, Illinois won a BEAMie for creative engagement strategies through their innovative approaches to common benchmarking challenges. To address building owners feeling overwhelmed by fixing their data quality issues, Oak Park created detailed written and visual instructions on their Knowledgebase for each individual data issue. These instructions are linked in feedback emails and owners can access them based on labels in their owner portal, making resolving data quality issues less overwhelming and more independent of a process. Separately, to highlight benchmarking benefits, the Village developed a form to collect benchmarking success stories (https://oakpark-il.beam-portal.org) that is sent out with scorecards, and created a "Congratulations, you've benchmarked! What's next?" Knowledgebase page. By identifying success stories and connecting building owners with next steps such as assessments, financing opportunities, and performance improvement options, Oak Park demonstrates how successful benchmarking programs help owners realize the tangible benefits of benchmarking.
Rookie of the Year: Outreach & Partnerships
The City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin was able to achieve a first-year compliance rate of 53.99% through extensive outreach to building owners and leveraging their partnership with the City’s NAIOP chapter. The team utilized office hours, customized resources, webinars, and 1:1 building owner support, along with proactive outreach, to achieve strong first-year engagement. In the spirit of collaboration, the City presented on the ordinance alongside the ClearlyEnergy team at a NAIOP meeting to help commercial building owners comply with, and benefit from, the policy.
Rookie Of The Year: Policy
Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER) had their first year of implementation in 2025 for their innovative Large Building Energy Reporting (LBER) policy. This benchmarking law is the first of its kind, and requires utilities to report electric, natural gas, and steam usage on behalf of building owners to reduce administrative burden. Owners of large buildings (20,000 square feet and larger) who use delivered fuels or additional energy sources are required to report these independently through Portfolio Manager, though utility data can still be pushed into their Portfolio Manager property on their behalf. Owners who only use electric, natural gas, and steam in their buildings just need to fill out a short form to comply with the ordinance - Portfolio Manager account creation and benchmarking is done fully on their behalf.
Percentage Improved From Last Year
The City of Reno, Nevada won the most improved compliance rate award this year with a 14 percentage point increase, after being the runner-up last year with a 32 percentage point increase. In their fourth year of reporting, the City's long-term efforts are paying off through their emphasis on individual relationships with building owners and early outreach. Reno usually publishes their covered buildings list near the beginning of the year and has already hosted a webinar for this reporting season. This gives building owners plenty of time to comply and spreads out incoming requests. The City actually decreased email outreach this past year based on previous feedback, reducing building owner fatigue. Additionally, despite technical challenges obtaining data from the local utility, the City used this as a touchpoint to build relationships with building owners and provide personalized support.
Best Meme
In a tight race between Andrew Held from DC and Thomas Carpenito from NYC, Thomas won our “Best Meme” BEAMie award, with BEAM stakeholders judging the contest.