Energy Benchmarking

Benchmarking means measuring a building’s energy use and then comparing it to the average for similar buildings. It allows owners and occupants to understand their building’s relative energy performance, and helps identify opportunities to cut energy waste. We believe that sharing this data can also drive the market to recognize and reward energy efficiency and create a continuous cycle of improvement and demand for high-performing buildings.

The Latest

Use Case: Whole-Building Energy Data

This use case focuses on whole-building energy data, which helps building owners understand and improve building energy performance.

Use Case: Energy Efficiency Program Savings and Participation

This use case focuses on energy efficiency program savings and participation data, which helps local governments understand trends in energy efficiency program uptake, identify under-represented neighborhoods that could benefit from efficiency, and assess trends in costs related to the implementation of particular measures, which may make them more or less likely to be acted upon by building owners.

Rethinking Energy Data Access: Conquering Barriers to Achieve Local Climate Goals

Local governments across the U.S. are leading the charge on a variety of complex objectives, which include developing plans to meet long-term climate goals, improving public health, increasing access to energy-saving programs, and enhancing local resilience to extreme weather. Utilities play an invaluable role in these efforts by collecting and sharing energy consumption and program … Continued

Rethinking Energy Data Access: Executive Summary

This executive summary of Rethinking Energy Data Access: Conquering Barriers to Achieve Local Climate Goals provides an easy-to-digest summary of the report’s top findings and recommendations for local government sustainability staff, utilities, and utility regulators on how to reform the ways in which data is requested, protected, and shared in order to advance critical goals for each party.

Sharing Data to Motivate Action

Sharing Data to Motivate Action is intended to help implementers of benchmarking and transparency policies understand the latest techniques for developing energy benchmarking scorecards, also called energy benchmarking profiles, which present energy data to building owners as actionable information to encourage investment in efficiency.

Managing Benchmarking Data Quality

Managing Benchmarking Data Quality was written to help  benchmarking policy implementers understand current best practices for managing data gathered from ordinances in states, counties, and cities across the U.S.

Analyzing Benchmarking Data

Analyzing Benchmarking Data provides useful knowledge on the annual benchmarking reports that many jurisdictions publish to summarize 12 months of reported energy and/or water utility data. It includes discussions of the types of analysis that jurisdictions with benchmarking laws have used to extract valuable information from the benchmarking data and gives examples of how some jurisdictions have calculated and displayed their analytical findings.

Putting Data to Work: Increasing Customer Engagement with Data

District of Columbia Sustainable Energy Utility  Under its 2012 Sustainable DC plan, the District of Columbia established targets that include reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50 percent by 2032 and by at least 80 percent by 2050, including a citywide energy-use reduction target of 50 percent by 2032. In December of 2017, Mayor Muriel … Continued

Putting Data to Work: Implementation Guide for Energy Efficiency Program Administrators

Using Building-Level Data to Improve Energy Efficiency Across the U.S., an increasing number of cities, counties, and states are examining building performance benchmarking and transparency as a critical step in addressing building energy and water use. These energy benchmarking and transparency requirements generate new and robust building-level datasets, and staff of utilities and contractors who … Continued