In the past two decades our industry has seen a significant shift toward a focus on energy efficiency and sustainability. In order to properly gauge whether this shift has had a quantifiable impact, terms such as Energy Use Intensity (EUI), Power Use Effectiveness (PUE), and Gallons/Day have become commonplace. These simplified metrics are useful tools in tracking the performance of buildings, but they have limits. For example, an airport may be a hub for popular airlines and see higher traffic than a similarly-sized airport on the other side of the city. The resulting higher energy use per square foot would be an indicator of success rather than a failure of building performance. To be truly efficient, we need to rethink our metrics. This paper will explore a range of common performance metrics covering all facets of the built environment, including energy, water, waste, human factors, and more. It will then examine where these metrics do and don't work, and how design teams can tailor metrics to their projects and define building performance in a way that benefits the overall impact of the building. Finally, scale will be introduced to explore how jumping from buildingscale to district-scale, or even city-scale, should impact the way we measure and evaluate performance.
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