Electrify Chicago

An independent tool for viewing City of Chicago building data

According to the 2022 Chicago Climate Action Plan(opens in a new tab), 69% of Chicago's emissions come from buildings, making building emissions our biggest challenge and our biggest opportunity as a city to tackle climate change. At Electrify Chicago, we showcase building performance using publicly available data supplemented by community-submitted photographs and building owners.

Start by looking at Chicago's buildings with the highest greenhouse gas intensity i.e. emissions per square foot. Large, efficient, buildings can perform much better than very inefficient small buildings on this metric.

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๐Ÿ“ฐ $30 Million In Missed Fines

The City Of Chicago failed to collect $30 million in potential fines from the building benchmarking ordinance, reducing transparency and accountability.

Read Our Full Blog Post On Millions in Missed Fines.

Chicago Buildings by Greenhouse Gas Intensity

Note: Data From Large Buildings in 2022

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 โ€œAs of 2016, this list includes all commercial, institutional, and residential buildings larger than 50,000 square feet.โ€ This dataset is also then filtered to only buildings with reported emissions > 1,000 metric tons CO2 equivalent.

The latest year of data is from 2022, but we update the site regularly when new data is available, and some buildings may have failed to report that year, and only have older data available.

Additionally, note that all tons specified are metric tons.

Name / Address Primary Property Type GHG Intensity
(kg CO2 eq./sqft)
Total GHG Emissions
(tons CO2 eq.)
Crown Hall
๐Ÿ“ท ๐Ÿ•ฐ๏ธ
(Illinois Tech)
3360 S State Street
College/University
555.1 kg/sqft
30,139 tons
Digital Lakeside
๐Ÿ“ท ๐Ÿ•ฐ๏ธ
350 E Cermak
Data Center
142.1 kg/sqft
173,706 tons
Hyde Park West Apartments
๐Ÿ•ฐ๏ธ
5325 S. Cottage Grove Ave
Multifamily Housing
126.0 kg/sqft
18,454 tons
CoreSite
๐Ÿšจ ๐Ÿ“ท
427 S LaSalle St
Data Center
114.8 kg/sqft
#1 Highest
18,365 tons
#19 Highest
Digital Printer's Row
๐Ÿšจ ๐Ÿ“ท
600 S Federal St
Data Center
93.5 kg/sqft
#2 Highest
17,324 tons
#21 Highest
Herman Hall
๐Ÿ“ท ๐Ÿ•ฐ๏ธ
(Illinois Tech)
3241 S Federal Street
College/University
88.9 kg/sqft
9,884 tons
Shop & Save Market - Nagle
๐Ÿ“ท ๐Ÿ•ฐ๏ธ
6312 N Nagle Ave
Supermarket/Grocery Store
83.7 kg/sqft
5,584 tons
Life Sciences Research Building
๐Ÿ•ฐ๏ธ
(Illinois Tech)
35 W 34th Street
College/University
80.7 kg/sqft
8,317 tons
6045 Kenwood Building
๐Ÿšจ ๐Ÿ“ท
(UChicago)
6045 S Kenwood Ave
Office
79.7 kg/sqft
#3 Highest
7,900 tons
Highest 4%
Salem Baptist Church of Chicago
๐Ÿšจ
10909 S Cottage Grove Ave
Worship Facility
78.0 kg/sqft
#4 Highest
7,160 tons
Highest 4%
Keating Hall
๐Ÿ“ท ๐Ÿ•ฐ๏ธ
(Illinois Tech)
3040 S Wabash Avenue
College/University
69.5 kg/sqft
3,694 tons
601 W Polk Street
๐Ÿšจ
601 W Polk Street
Data Center
62.2 kg/sqft
#5 Highest
6,467 tons
Highest 5%
Searle Chemistry Laboratory
๐Ÿšจ ๐Ÿ“ท
(UChicago)
5735 S Ellis Ave
Laboratory
49.0 kg/sqft
#6 Highest
4,193 tons
Highest 9%
BSLC
๐Ÿ•ฐ๏ธ
924 E 57th St
Laboratory
47.2 kg/sqft
8,296 tons
WGN Studios
๐Ÿšจ
2501 W BRADLEY PL
Office
46.8 kg/sqft
#7 Highest
3,068 tons
Highest 14%
Page 1 of 226 (Building #1 to #15)

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