Boston’s Older Labs and Offices Face Emissions Deadlines. The Biggest Savings Are Often in the Air Handling.

Owners of large buildings in Boston now operate under the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO), which requires non-residential buildings of 20,000 square feet or more and residential buildings with 15 or more units to report energy and water use every year and meet emissions standards. Those standards begin in 2025 or 2030 depending on building size, and the ordinance expects every covered building to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

For owners of older laboratory and office buildings, the deadlines raise a practical question: where should the first capital dollars go? Engineers who work on these buildings tend to give the same answer. Start with the systems that run the most hours and move the most air.

Why labs are a special case

Laboratories use far more energy per square foot than offices, mainly because of ventilation. Fume hoods and lab exhaust systems pull conditioned air out of the building continuously, and every cubic foot of that air has to be heated, cooled and moved by fans first. In buildings designed decades ago, those systems often run at full capacity around the clock whether or not anyone is working at a hood.

A retrofit of the University of Pennsylvania’s 1973 Wing chemistry building, known as Chem 73, shows how much is at stake. When the work began in 2011, the building had 65 chemistry labs and more than 100 belt-driven exhaust fans running 365 days a year. It conditioned and exhausted more than 280,000 cubic feet per minute of air, at a ventilation cost of roughly $10 per CFM, or more than $3 million a year. Occupants also dealt with temperature swings and noisy exhaust.

Engineers from AHA Consulting Engineers fitted all 137 fume hoods, 82 of them original to the building, with monitoring equipment that adjusts exhaust to actual use and shuts back automatically when a hood is not in use. AHA also installed six new high-plume exhaust fans on the roof. The project removed 182,000 CFM of unnecessary airflow while keeping peak capacity available for emergencies.

The results: power consumption fell from 735,000 kWh to 447,000 kWh, a reduction of almost 40 percent, and annual savings totaled $1.8 million. Lab temperatures now hold within a quarter degree of setpoint, service calls for the system stopped, and the project finished 5 percent under budget and a month ahead of schedule. The hoods were decommissioned and upgraded in phases, so lab work continued throughout.

A study before a strategy

Not every building has an obvious problem like Chem 73’s. For most owners, the first step is a decarbonization study that looks at one building’s systems and operations and ranks the options.

AHA’s process starts with the owner’s carbon reduction goals and the building’s existing systems. Engineers then identify energy conservation measures and carbon reduction measures that suit that building, and estimate the energy savings and carbon reduction for each. More detailed studies add building-specific energy modeling, cost estimates and payback analysis, and a review of on-site renewable energy and green power purchasing. The result is a roadmap owners can fold into their capital plans instead of a one-time list of ideas.

The firm has used this approach across lab and office portfolios in Boston and Cambridge. On campuses, where dozens of buildings share a single carbon goal, AHA reports that its energy and sustainability work in 2023 saved 5,000,000 kWh and 6,000 therms and reduced emissions by 15,000 tons of CO2e.

Getting the data right

Every reduction plan depends on accurate baseline data, and BERDO requires third-party verification of what buildings report. In May 2026, the City of Boston named AHA its third-party data verifier for BERDO, covering 369 municipal buildings. The firm already verifies data for 515 buildings for the Boston Housing Authority under the same program.

For owners, that verification step is also an opportunity. Data that has been checked by an independent engineer shows which buildings are furthest from their targets, and that is where a study and the first round of upgrades should start.