Facility Benchmarking

Benchmarking is an activity to identify and track energy consumption within a building. Benefits include the ability to:

• Track the amount of overall energy usage within a building or several buildings.
• Observe any changes and trends on a monthly, seasonal, and annual basis. 
• Rate energy consumption of your facilities with similar buildings in the same region. 
• Make qualified decisions to improve building performance and meet other goals.
• Quantitatively track and verify results of energy saving activities.

Establish a Baseline

The first step in benchmarking is to identify all energy consumption within your building or portfolo of buildings. Note that this isn't always a straightforward exercise, since buildings often have multiple meters, or a structure may receive utilities from a neighboring building. Generally speaking, you will want to create a benchmark of each individual building, as well as the full portfolio of buildings. This helps to support future investment decisions.

Once all structures are inventoried and organized into an acceptable portfolio, the buildings and their associated meters are entered into a benchmarking tool. At this point any historical and ongoing utility data can be entered. The tool can also be configured to receive routine data feeds from utility providers.

Observe Patterns and Changes

Depending on the data entered into the benchmarking tool, you can:

• Track the routine energy consumption for each meter, building, or entire portfolio.
• Identify potential problems indicated by sudden changes in consumption patterns.
• Compare annual data to identify possible long-term trends such as degrading systems.
• Identify buildings with unusually high energy consumption.
• Determine the best candidates for energy efficiency measures.

Each of these observations develop a story of a building's energy consumption and performance. These can then be used to compare your building with other, similar buildings, and to make decisions on how to lower energy use and improve performance.

Rate Your Building

Benchmarks can be used to rate a building and see how well it compares to similar buildings within the same region. As a simple metric, the benchmark rating is easy to understand at all levels in an organization. This makes it easier to establish energy performance goals, put them in place, and monitor results.

Manage Your Building Energy

With a history of your building's energy consumption, routine monitoring, and an idea of how your building compares with other buildings, you are ready to make some decisions. Decisions can be for a variety of reasons, such as to:

• Set investment priorities: A facility manager often must assess the cost of a facility, compare options, and make decisions on investment opportunities within a building or overall portfolio. A benchmarking tool can help to compare cost savings among options within a building, or between several buildings. This helps to prioritize the most cost-effective facility upgrades.
• Track and verify improvements: Improvement programs are only valuable if they actually deliver their stated goals. Benchmarking provides the needed monitoring and evaluation tools to assess which improvements resulted in real energy savings.
• Meet regulatory requirements: With heightened awareness regarding climate change, legislation such as AB-32 is requiring organizations to take responsibility for the environmental consequences of energy consumption. Benchmarking provides a quantifiable method to determine current consumption, set reduction goals, and monitor progress and attainment. 
• Address environmental and social responsibility: Organizations face increasing pressure to be good corporate citizens. Benchmarking gives an organization the ability to proactively monitor and adjust their energy consumption habits and deliver products and services with lower environmental and social costs. Benchmarking also provides the documentation to support applications rating systems such as Energy Star label and LEED.
• Develop Best Practice Management: Many organizations are discovering that an efficient operation makes good business sense.

Companies that keep their operations working efficiently are leaner, better informed, and able to weather changes, particularly rising energy costs. Buldings with low energy footprints have an advantage during sale, mortgage, and lease negotiations.

Leading by Example

RCEA is working to establish model benchmarking policies and procedures for consideration by its member agencies, and will conduct benchmarking for participating municipalities. This initiative is still in development, and more information will be available once the program is fully underway. To learn more about benchmarking in general, here are a few resources:

• Energy Star Benchmarking Starter Kit: An EPA resource page on benchmarking, specifically focused on their Portfolio Manager online benchmarking tool.
• Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey: This survey occurs every four years to gathers data on building characteristics and energy use from thousands of buildings across the United States.