Data Integrity: The Key to Accurate Benchmarking for Your Sustainability Program
Benchmarking provides a starting place for measuring and improving an individual building’s energy performance. Energy benchmarking is often the first step in developing a comprehensive energy management plan. With energy benchmarking, you learn how your building’s energy performance compares with similar facilities nationwide.
More importantly, benchmarking highlights areas where you can improve, which are opportunities to reduce energy usage and costs. Research shows that owners who benchmark their buildings are more likely to invest in energy efficiency improvements, such as sensors and smart meters. Owners might even receive incentives (such as rebates) for investing in energy efficiency improvements.
But benchmarking is also a way to get essential information that supports your greater corporate sustainability initiatives. For organizations that own many buildings — even hundreds of buildings — ENERGY STAR ratings and Greenprint building performance reporting is essential to measuring the performance of the entire portfolio so they can ensure they are meeting the objectives of their corporate sustainability initiatives.
For these organizations, an ENERGY STAR rating is an essential first step in measuring the energy footprint of individual buildings. Greenprint collects and aggregates ENERGY STAR data across an entire portfolio. Owners can see where each building stands in relation to others and in relation to overall corporate goals.
However, if the data input into ENERGY STAR is inconsistent, incomplete, or incorrect (because utility bills are hard to understand), the ratings will not be accurate. That means, of course, that the Greenprint reporting is also inaccurate.
How do you ensure data integrity from the start?
The ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager tool can help you get started with benchmarking. However, to get a complete picture of your building’s energy usage profile, you need an energy audit in addition to benchmarking, such as the type of thorough audit that ETS provides.
Our audit doesn’t just correct your data. ETS is licensed to perform energy audits and benchmarking to enable buildings to comply with local laws, such as New York City’s Local Law 84 (LL84) and Local Law 87 (LL87). As part of its energy audit, ETS will:
- Conduct an ASHRAE Level II building energy audit — a detailed survey and analysis of the building’s energy systems to define potential energy efficiency improvements.
- Determine energy efficiency measures (EEMs) to reduce energy costs.
- Review equipment and appliances to qualify the building for energy efficiency cash rebates.
- Inspect and photograph the building (such as windows and doors), all major equipment in the building (such as equipment in mechanical rooms), common areas, and typical residential apartments.
- Interview staff.
- Conduct a technology assessment (for example, review physical main building utility meters).
- Analyze utility bills.
Based on the audit findings, ETS will recommend a plan that will enable a building to comply with local energy codes (e.g., New York City’s LL84 and LL87).
We train your building management staff to understand where the data on utility bills is coming from, how to capture the correct data for reporting, and how to use that data to measure progress of your sustainability efforts.
It starts with visibility and transparency
The resulting information empowers your building managers to:
- Ensure energy data is being reflected properly in your ENERGY STAR and Greenprint energy benchmarking reports.
- Offer price protection to mitigate supply-side market risk.
- Help you rethink common-area, retail, and residential energy patterns to holistically reduce your total consumption.
The energy audit is the first step in ETS’s Fast Trak program. Fast Trak provides a total energy management plan that’s also an energy savings plan designed to reduce your energy costs. It empowers building management and operations staff to engage in energy and cost-saving strategies and behaviors that will improve the returns on your building investment.
[cta]Corporate sustainability isn’t just a buzzword — it’s a sound business strategy. Contact ETS to sign up for a portfolio property management webinar and learn how energy efficiency can be part of your sustainability program.[/cta]
