Emerging Strategies for Effective Energy Efficiency Benchmarking: Normalization, Economic Analysis, and Data Aggregation

The market is being transformed by energy data. Information from the first generation municipal disclosure requirements across the US is widely influencing conversations about commercial real estate. The market is quickly recognizing an important new financial consideration in commercial real-estate transactions: comparative building energy use data. Although this trend represents significant progress toward better management of building sector energy use, the common tools in the market used to normalize, compare, and aggregate building performance tend to be over-simplified, and inadequate as a basis for complicated financial comparisons in leasing and purchase transactions. This presentation explores three aspects of this issue that can support more robust and effective market impacts of comparative benchmarking strategies: 1. How the factors used (or omitted) in data normalization for comparative building performance benchmarking can result in misleading assessments of key real estate value propositions; 2. A new analytical approach that accounts for the comparative economic contribution of commercial building tenants with respect to total building energy consumption as a basis for building performance comparisons, and; 3. New approaches to the design and implementation of data aggregation and analysis for large, heterogeneous sets of commercial buildings, including discussion of fundamental design principles for scalable information infrastructures and emerging approaches to integrating energy efficiency metrics across the lifecycle of commercial buildings. Taken together, this paper provides a cross-cutting perspective on current and emerging opportunities to improve the viability and effectiveness of commercial sector energy performance benchmarking in driving meaningful market transformation.