Energy use benchmarking is a mechanism to measure energy performance of a single building over time, relative to other similar buildings, or to modeled simulations of a reference building built to a specific standard (such as an energy code). (Department of Energy)

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.

Buildings account of 40% of the total energy used in the United States.

This means that we have a massive opportunity in the real estate market and building management sphere to highlight building efficiency. We can do this through the share of information and resources regarding building performance and energy use.

A growing number of jurisdictions in the U.S. are passing energy benchmarking and transparency policies to address this information and resource gap.

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)