Using Energy Information Services as aDelivery Channel for Energy Efficiency

摘要

Benchmarking comparative building performance continues to be one of the majorchallenges 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 oncensus 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 largeportfolio owners and managers who have to prioritize their approach to energy efficiencyinvestments across multiple facilities. To address this challenge, several leaders in the field ofenergy information systems, which supply energy usage, demand, and billing information overtime, have added the capability to automatically benchmark their customers' buildings. Theadvantage of this integrated capability is that all the pertinent data tends to reside in the databaseshosted by these energy information providers and their customer base tends to be naturallyinterested in prioritizing buildings by performance using a third party metric.Currently, six energy information providers have adopted the protocols required toprovide benchmarks within their systems. During the pilot phase of this initiative, many of theseparticipants provided critical guidance associated with the mechanics and larger integrationopportunity. Lessons learned will be presented that will allow other initiatives to consider howto engage with this critical but still untapped segment of the marketplace, which is likely to growin importance as service providers recognize the opportunity and ease with which they can offervalue-added information services.