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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 2021, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

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 2021, 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.)
70800552 -- Chicago
🚩
7030 S Ashland Ave
Supermarket/Grocery Store
28.5 kg/sqft
#31 Highest
1,804 tons
Highest 26%
00187- Chicago, IL
🚩
11730 S Marshfield Ave
Supermarket/Grocery Store
28.2 kg/sqft
#32 Highest
1,737 tons
Highest 27%
53100515--CHICAGO
🚩
1800 W LAWRENCE AVE
Supermarket/Grocery Store
27.9 kg/sqft
#33 Highest
2,245 tons
Highest 19%
53100522--CHICAGO
🚩
5201 Sheridan Rd
Supermarket/Grocery Store
27.8 kg/sqft
#34 Highest
1,533 tons
Highest 31%
Pete's Kedgie
🚩
4700 S Kedzie Ave
Supermarket/Grocery Store
27.7 kg/sqft
#35 Highest
1,495 tons
Highest 31%
03470- Chicago, IL
🚩
3570 N Elston Ave
Supermarket/Grocery Store
27.3 kg/sqft
#36 Highest
1,501 tons
Highest 31%
Whole Foods LVW
🚩
3201 N ASHLAND AVE
Supermarket/Grocery Store
27.0 kg/sqft
#38 Highest
2,216 tons
Highest 20%
70800567 -- North and Cisero
🚩
4821 - 4951 W North Ave
Supermarket/Grocery Store
27.0 kg/sqft
#38 Highest
1,568 tons
Highest 30%
03721- Chicago, IL
🚩
6107 S Archer Ave
Supermarket/Grocery Store
27.0 kg/sqft
#38 Highest
1,352 tons
Highest 35%
Jones Laboratory
🚩
(UChicago)
5747 S Ellis Ave
Laboratory
26.9 kg/sqft
#40 Highest
1,945 tons
Highest 24%
Roscoe Square/ 90034
🚩
3330 N Western Ave
Supermarket/Grocery Store
26.7 kg/sqft
#41 Highest
1,372 tons
Highest 34%
03538- Chicago, IL
🚩
1763 W Howard St
Supermarket/Grocery Store
26.5 kg/sqft
#42 Highest
1,864 tons
Highest 25%
Lurie Children's Lincoln Park Outpatient Center - Deming
🚩
467 W Deming Pl
Mixed Use Property
26.4 kg/sqft
#43 Highest
1,663 tons
Highest 28%
600 North Michigan Avenue
🚩
600 N MICHIGAN AVE
Retail Store
26.3 kg/sqft
#45 Highest
5,513 tons
Highest 6%
Stroger Hospital Campus
🚨
1901 W Harrison St
Hospital (General Medical & Surgical)
26.3 kg/sqft
#45 Highest
41,988 tons
#6 Highest
Page 3 of 171 (Building #31 to #45)

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