Commercial, Demand Management, Energy Efficiency - March 22, 2017
DOE unveils free energy use benchmarking tool
Through a partnership with software as a service company Lucid, the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently announced the availability of a new tool that allows organizations to more easily leverage expansive energy use data available through multiple government data sources.
In a joint statement, the lab and Lucid said the tool, called BenchmarkMyBuilding, is "the industry's first free self-service benchmark for building energy consumption and costs."
made available by the DOE and the U.S. EPA's Energy Star program, according to a March 15 news release. The benchmark calculates the associated annual energy costs, and delivers the findings in an intuitive report that can be shared with collaborators, operators, investors and occupants.
The statement from the DOE and Lucid reads:
The DOE and Energy Star have assembled the largest database of information related to building energy consumption in the world, representing nearly 4.8 million buildings, comprising 68 billion square feet of commercial building space. However, these databases are geared toward skilled engineers rather than more general business audiences and do not prioritize cost information. Lucid weaves these data sets together to provide both cost and consumption benchmarks, with insights into how much improvement is possible. Traditionally, the process to calculate such insights could take weeks for teams to undertake and would require specialized industry expertise. BenchmarkMyBuilding removes those barriers, making valuable comparisons and instant visibility over the energy efficiency potential of buildings available to anyone.
Having used the tool, Dana Jennings, global sustainability project manager for LinkedIn said in a statement that it has made consistent benchmarking of the company's buildings less challenging.
"We had both EnergyStar and DOE sources and weren't sure about how to intertwine them," Jennings said. "This will be great for people trying to get started during the initial stages of benchmarking."
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