Today, residential and commercial buildings’ heating, cooling, and operational systems consume 40 percent of all domestic energy and more than 75 percent of electricity. The primary sources of information about building energy use in the United States are the Commercial and Residential Building Energy Consumption Surveys. The Department of Energy (DOE) conducts these surveys every four years. The survey data does not directly include many types of energy consumption, data on lighting and plug loads, which require a labor-intensive collection and cleaning process.
The DOE Building Performance Database (BPD), the country’s largest dataset on energy characteristics of individual commercial and residential buildings, includes actual utility use data and key characteristics from over 740,000 buildings. BPD allows users to identify and forecast the benefits of energy-saving opportunities. However, DOE currently relies on industry and governments to voluntarily provide energy use data to populate the database.
New and emerging technologies provides an alternative that could present better, more timely data. Building owners are installing increasingly sophisticated control systems that provide advanced monitoring and can control the building’s energy requirements and use. These systems, which may belong to the building or an energy utility, are a rapidly growing tool of the Internet of Things (IoT). They collect large amounts of data on how the building uses energy that building managers use to optimize energy performance and anticipate maintenance problems. However, the lack of interoperability standards for sensors, controls, and controllers has been a major barrier. This data would be of enormous value to help utilities, researchers, and policymakers could analyze to improve energy efficiency strategies nationwide.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) should work with the private sector to tap building energy management systems as data sources for BPD. DOE should consider providing incentives for building owners to standardize and share this data. Through agreements with utilities, DOE could automate data collection from these systems to support more sophisticated and timely analysis. The manufacturers of these systems could provide technical expertise, along with government centers, such as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which cleans the BPD data, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which has been researching the potential for using data from energy management systems.
Data from building energy management systems will become more valuable as they are more widely deployed. Many large buildings now have sophisticated energy management systems, and smaller buildings are expected to adopt similar but simpler control systems in the near future. But while the growth of this technology can provide a wealth of data, the data from different systems made by different manufacturers could be incompatible and not interoperable. Today, these manufacturers operate independently without coordinating their data structure or collection.
To address that problem, the EERE should develop standards for buildings’ energy usage data. The EERE could use a public-private approach similar to the process that DOE used to develop data standards for Green Button, the program that provides data on energy usage back to individual consumers.
In parallel, emerging technologies around the IoT are helping to improve building energy efficiency and could dramatically increase available data, including commercial building utility data and residential utility data. Opportunities include smarter systems and better sensing of conditions that can inform more efficient energy management, such as localized weather information. EERE should partner with industry and other key players, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to insure that energy-relevant IoT technologies can interoperate with building energy management systems and provide, where appropriate, real-time open data.
Developing new sources of energy data would have significant benefits. Drawing on data from building energy management systems would provide data in close to real time, with enough granularity to correlate changes in energy use with weather and other factors. By publishing this data as open data, the EIA would enable private industry, nonprofits, and academics to analyze the data and find new opportunities to increase energy efficiency.