Using Energy Information Services as a Delivery Channel for Energy Efficiency

Don Anderson and Jennifer Taylor, ICF Consulting
Bill Von Neida, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Keywords

Abstract

Benchmarking comparative building performance continues to be one of the major challenges for owners and programs seeking to improve efficiency across portfolios of buildings. EPA’s ENERGY STAR program has done much to create a systematic approach based on census data and, at this point, applied it to a significant population of US buildings. However, data entry challenges are still significant for the target user audience, which are primarily large portfolio owners and managers who have to prioritize their approach to energy efficiency investments across multiple facilities. To address this challenge, several leaders in the field of energy information systems, which supply energy usage, demand, and billing information over time, have added the capability to automatically benchmark their customers’ buildings. The advantage of this integrated capability is that all the pertinent data tends to reside in the databases hosted by these energy information providers and their customer base tends to be naturally interested in prioritizing buildings by performance using a third party metric.

Currently, six energy information providers have adopted the protocols required to provide benchmarks within their systems. During the pilot phase of this initiative, many of these participants provided critical guidance associated with the mechanics and larger integration opportunity. Lessons learned will be presented that will allow other initiatives to consider how to engage with this critical but still untapped segment of the marketplace, which is likely to grow in importance as service providers recognize the opportunity and ease with which they can offer value-added information services.