The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and General Services Administration, agreed to a set of guiding principles for designing, building, and operating federal facilities that will save energy and protect the environment.

Energy efficiency is a key element of the principles, officially titled, "The Federal Leadership Memorandum of Understanding to adopt Guiding Principles for High Performance and Sustainable Buildings."

Agreed to at the White House Summit on Federal Sustainable Buildings, the guiding principles integrate design, energy performance, water conservation, indoor air quality, and sustainable materials to ensure that new buildings are among the most energy efficient in the country.

They also outline that building components should exceed the energy code, and that the actual energy performance of a building, during and through the first year of operation, should be verified against its design target using EPA's Energy Star performance rating system for buildings.

The federal government owns approximately 445,000 buildings with a total floor space of over 3 billion square feet, in addition to leasing 57,000 buildings comprising 374 million square feet of floor space. If federal buildings reduce energy by 10 percent, in 10 years taxpayers would save $420 million dollars and reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from more than 625,000 cars.

For more information, download the Guiding Principles for Federal Leadership and visit the Energy Star buildings webpage.

2/3/2006