Energy efficiency in buildings plays an outsized role in the fight against climate change. In New York City, buildings account for 66% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. In 2009, New York City introduced a benchmarking law that requires owners of large buildings to measure and report their annual energy consumptions. This dataset allows us to formulate and test our research question, “What are the trends in energy efficiency in buildings in NYC.” We explored this question in three perspectives: building scale, neighborhood scale, and temporal scale. This research has shown that the size of the building correlates with electricity consumption and GHG emissions. Yet, energy use intensity (EUI) is irrelevant to size, age, and density of a building. Thus, old and large buildings can be highly energy efficient contrary to common misconception. Also, identifying spatial patterns of energy consumption at different scales can have enormous potential to develop targeted energy strategies per neighborhood.