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Electrify Chicago

According to the 2022 Chicago Climate Action Plan(opens in a new tab), a whopping 69% of Chicago's emissions come from buildings, making it our biggest challenge and our biggest opportunity as a city to tackle change. At Electrify Chicago we want to showcase some of the best and worst performing buildings in the city using publicly available data and manual annotations to add building photographs and label multi-building owners like universities.

You can start by looking at Chicago's buildings with the highest greenhouse gas intensity - this means that they use the most energy when adjusted per unit of square foot, so big buildings could actually perform much better than very inefficient small buildings on this metric.

Chicago Buildings by Greenhouse Gas Intensity

Note: Data only includes large Chicago buildings from 2020

Note: This data only includes buildings whose emissions are reported under the Chicago Energy Benchmarking Ordinance(opens in a new tab). According to the City β€œAs of 2016, this list includes all commercial, institutional, and residential buildings larger than 50,000 square feet.” This dataset is also then filtered to only buildings with reported emissions > 1,000 metric tons CO2 equivalent.

This data is also from 2020, but when new benchmark data is available, we'll update the site.

Property Name / address Primary Property Type Greenhouse Gas Intensity
(kg CO2 eq./sqft)
Total Greenhouse Emissions
(metric tons CO2 eq.)
Keating Hall
🚨 πŸ“·
(Illinois Tech)
3040 S Wabash Avenue
College/University
461.6 kg/sqft
#1 Highest
24,538 tons
#12 Highest
Digital Lakeside
🚨 πŸ“·
350 E Cermak
Data Center
142.1 kg/sqft
#2 Highest
173,706 tons
#1 Highest
352 360 W WELLINGTON AVE
🚨 πŸ“·
352 360 W WELLINGTON AVE
Multifamily Housing
136.5 kg/sqft
#3 Highest
19,870 tons
#24 Highest
CoreSite
🚨 πŸ“·
427 S LaSalle St
Data Center
114.3 kg/sqft
#4 Highest
18,282 tons
#31 Highest
Digital Printer's Row
🚨 πŸ“·
600 S Federal St
Data Center
105.8 kg/sqft
#5 Highest
18,979 tons
#27 Highest
Herman Hall
🚨 πŸ“·
(Illinois Tech)
3241 S Federal Street
College/University
89.2 kg/sqft
#6 Highest
9,912 tons
Highest 6%
Tech Business Center
🚨 πŸ“·
(Illinois Tech)
3440 S Dearborn Street
College/University
87.0 kg/sqft
#7 Highest
12,246 tons
Highest 4%
Shop & Save Market - Nagle
🚨 πŸ“·
6312 N Nagle Ave
Supermarket/Grocery Store
83.7 kg/sqft
#8 Highest
5,584 tons
Highest 13%
6045 Kenwood Building
🚨 πŸ“·
(UChicago)
6045 S Kenwood Ave
Office
51.1 kg/sqft
#9 Highest
5,069 tons
Highest 15%
Lowden Homes
🚨 πŸ“·
200 W 95th St
Multifamily Housing
48.1 kg/sqft
#10 Highest
5,530 tons
Highest 13%
William Eckhardt Research Center
🚩 πŸ“·
(UChicago)
5640 S ELLIS AVE
Laboratory
46.2 kg/sqft
#11 Highest
13,137 tons
#50 Highest
Searle Chemistry Laboratory
🚩 πŸ“·
(UChicago)
5735 S Ellis Ave
Laboratory
45.4 kg/sqft
#12 Highest
3,885 tons
Highest 22%
Salem Baptist Church of Chicago
🚩
10909 S Cottage Grove Ave
Worship Facility
42.9 kg/sqft
#13 Highest
3,941 tons
Highest 22%
McGowan North
🚩
(DePaul)
2325 N Clifton Ave
College/University
42.6 kg/sqft
#14 Highest
2,386 tons
Highest 41%
Whole Foods KBS
🚩
1550 N Kingsbury St
Supermarket/Grocery Store
37.9 kg/sqft
#15 Highest
3,767 tons
Highest 23%

Data Source: Chicago Energy Benchmarking Data (opens in a new tab)