Release Notes

September 22nd, 2025 - Enhanced Building Owner Pages & Hero Imagery

We made significant improvements to building owner pages to make them more compelling and informative. Each owner page now features a hero that showcases images of the buildings they own, showing a quick preview of some of their properties. We've added this hero imagery to other pages, like our all electric page!

Building owner pages now also include additional statistics and graphs to help you better understand each owner's environmental impact, including total square footage, total emissions, average greenhouse gas intensity, and a breakdown of their buildings' grades.

Additionally, we've improved meta imagery across the site - pages now have proper social media preview images, making them look better when shared on social platforms!

Update Oct. 2025: We've now added these same stats and graphs to the ward pages as well!

Building owner page showing basic layout without hero images

Before

Enhanced building owner page with building hero images and improved stats

After

IIT owner page before improvements

IIT Before

IIT owner page with new building hero and enhanced statistics

IIT After

August 22nd, 2025 - Data Update to 2023 & Citywide Stats

We updated the source data to the year 2023, bringing in the latest building emissions and energy data. This update includes 61 new buildings that submitted data for the first time and 288 buildings that stopped reporting from the previous year.

You can track building participation with our new Latest Updates Page! discover which buildings joined or dropped out of Chicago's energy benchmarking program between data years.

Want to see the bigger picture? Check out our new Citywide Stats Page! We've got a variety of graphs that reveal citywide trends over time, so you can see if Chicago buildings are getting cleaner or dirtier year over year.

August 5th, 2025 - Improved Printing for Buildings

We added a new print button that makes it easy to print our building pages, so you can print off a building that you're interested in. Our print mode removes navigation elements to focus on the building data and make pages more suitable for printing or saving as PDFs, including a QR code so folks who see the printed page can see the full data.

Building page showing the new print mode button in the top right corner

New Print Button

Building page in print mode showing clean layout without navigation or footer

Print Preview

June 6th, 2025 - Added Ward Info & Pages

Buildings now have their ward shown on the building details page, and there are pages for all of Chicago's 50 wards. These are linked from an individual building, our Wards Page, or can be found directly at electrifychicago.net/ward/WardNumber (e.g. https://electrifychicago.net/ward/1).

March 14th, 2025 - Building Grades v1

We wanted to make buildings more easy to understand at a glance, so you can quickly see if a building is a top performer or highly polluting. After months of hard work, we released our first version of building grades, based off of emissions intensity, energy mix, and consistent reporting.

Want to learn more? Read About Our Grading!

The Electrify Chicago homepage showing Chicago's most emissions intense buildings and some featured Chicago buildings, with Crown Hall getting an F, Digital Lakeside getting a C, and more.

Our Homepage With Grades (as of March 2025)

Electrify Chicago's Marina Towers page, showing it has an overall A, a B under emissions intensity, an A under electricity mix, and an A for consistent reporting.

A Sample Building With Its Report Card (as of March 2025)

February 14th, 2025 - Homepage Redesign

We redesigned the homepage to make it more visually appealing and prompt people to our two most common features - our search and our map page. We also added some featured buildings, like museums, to encourage people to explore the site for buildings they know about!

Electrify Chicago Homepage showing a lot of introductory text and a table of buildings

Before

Electrify Chicago Homepage with a large skyline hero section at the top with a prominent search bar and a blue map links, and tiles of buildings below with images for each building and their overall emissions and GHG intensity

After

August 30th, 2024 - New Visualizations for Historic Changes & Energy Mix

We added new graphs to help visualize how buildings have changed in their emissions, emissions intensity, and energy use over time, and a new pie chart that shows the mix of types of energy a building consumes, making it easy to see at a glance if a building is mostly using electricity, fossil gas, or something else!

Electrify Chicago Merchandise Mart Page showing just stat tiles with no graphs.

Before

Electrify Chicago Merchandise Mart Page showing just stat tiles with graphs showing greenhouse gas intensity and total emissions have improved over time, and that Merch Mart's energy use is 44% electricity, 40% fossil gas, and 16% district chilling

After

April 2nd, 2024 - Data Update to 2022

Updated the source data to the year 2022, and dropped the filter limiting buildings to the latest year on most pages, so that dirty buildings that didn't report in 2022 still show up on our largest emitter lists. Buildings shown that have old data now use a mantel clock emoji (🕰️).

August 30th, 2023 - Data Update to 2021

Updated the source data to the year 2021, which prevents being able to access 2020 data (for now) but also adds all reported buildings, removing the filter for emissions > 1,000 tons. Additionally, buildings that did not report in 2020 will have their latest year of data shown, so only buildings with data in 2020 and 2021 have data loss.

We will be working on showing historical data, including comparisons, in a future update.

Found a bug or have a feature request? File an issue on the Electrify Chicago GitHub !