What is Energy Benchmarking?

Energy benchmarking is a process that measures and compares a single building’s energy use to similar buildings, its past performance, or a reference level. It can help identify how efficient a building is and where to make energy-efficient improvements.

Energy benchmarking includes any fuel coming into your building, such as gas, steam, electric, etc. The most common metric used in this process is energy use intensity.

Benchmarking informs organizations about how they use energy, where they use it, and what drives their energy use. It is a key step in identifying opportunities to increase profitability by lowering energy and operating costs. For example:

• In commercial real estate, decreasing energy costs by 30 percent is equivalent to increasing net operating income by 4 percent.

• In the healthcare industry, each dollar that a hospital saves in energy costs is comparable to generating new revenues of $20.

• In the supermarket retail industry, a 10 percent reduction in energy costs is equivalent to increasing sales per square foot by $70. Realizing these savings can be catalyzed through benchmarking.

(ENERGY STAR® PDF)

A growing number of jurisdictions in the U.S. are passing energy benchmarking and transparency policies. In the State of Michigan, energy codes set forth by the State determine minimum energy efficiency levels for commercial building systems. 

Local code officials are required to enforce the state energy requirements which means that achieving energy efficiency levels beyond code is currently up to the building owner & project teams. Lowering energy usage is essential to reaching emissions goals as they are directly related.