Energy Benchmarking

Energy benchmarking is essential for understanding a building’s energy use and how it compares to the average energy usage in similar building types. To learn more about the benefits of benchmarking, check out IMT’s resources below.

The Latest

Use Case: Whole-Building Energy Data

This use case focuses on whole-building energy data, which helps building owners understand and improve building energy performance.

Use Case: Energy Efficiency Program Savings and Participation

This use case focuses on energy efficiency program savings and participation data, which helps local governments understand trends in energy efficiency program uptake, identify under-represented neighborhoods that could benefit from efficiency, and assess trends in costs related to the implementation of particular measures, which may make them more or less likely to be acted upon by building owners.

Rethinking Energy Data Access: Conquering Barriers to Achieve Local Climate Goals

Local governments across the U.S. are leading the charge on a variety of complex objectives, which include developing plans to meet long-term climate goals, improving public health, increasing access to energy-saving programs, and enhancing local resilience to extreme weather. Utilities play an invaluable role in these efforts by collecting and sharing energy consumption and program … Continued

Rethinking Energy Data Access: Executive Summary

This executive summary of Rethinking Energy Data Access: Conquering Barriers to Achieve Local Climate Goals provides an easy-to-digest summary of the report’s top findings and recommendations for local government sustainability staff, utilities, and utility regulators on how to reform the ways in which data is requested, protected, and shared in order to advance critical goals for each party.

Why Building Codes Make Our Cities and Communities More Resilient

The number, frequency, and intensity of disasters affecting U.S. cities is growing. From floods and fires to sub-zero cold snaps and extreme heat, it seems like every week we are provided with another example of why communities need more tools to ensure they are more resilient, prepared for weather-related disruptions, and can quickly recover. The … Continued

What You Should Know: Fort Collins’ New Benchmarking Ordinance

After more than a year of private sector and community engagement, Fort Collins, Colo., became the 25th U.S. city to pass a benchmarking and transparency policy for privately owned buildings on December 4. This is a key step in accomplishing Fort Collins’ ambitious climate goal of being carbon neutral by 2050, and follows the City’s … Continued

Chicago Launches First Building Energy Rating System in the U.S.

Cities are prime venues in which we can tackle climate change by crafting and implementing proven, common-sense building energy efficiency interventions that reduce energy consumption, save money, and cut back harmful emissions associated with energy generation and use. In this post, we take a look at Chicago’s new building energy rating system and how it … Continued

Top Takeaways for Other Cities from Seattle’s New Benchmarking Report

Last week, the City of Seattle released a new summary report highlighting the results of its citywide building benchmarking and transparency program for 2014 to 2016, and the findings are encouraging. For example, consider these two highlights: Compliance is high. In 2016, the last year covered by the new report, 3,352 buildings reported, representing over … Continued

Sharing Data to Motivate Action

Sharing Data to Motivate Action is intended to help implementers of benchmarking and transparency policies understand the latest techniques for developing energy benchmarking scorecards, also called energy benchmarking profiles, which present energy data to building owners as actionable information to encourage investment in efficiency.