by Brianna Crandall — February 8, 2016—As part of the Better Buildings Initiative, the U.S. Department of Energy has just featured 12 new partnerships with cities, counties, and states to unlock the power of building energy performance data for the purposes of informing decision-making on energy efficiency opportunities in their local communities.
Through the Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) Platform Collaborative, these partners will improve the quality and consistency of building energy data and increase community-wide support to enhance management, promote transparency, and increase the value of building energy performance information.
The increase of building energy data available in the marketplace has resulted in the need for development of standardized, interoperable tools that assist stakeholders in streamlining and analyzing data in order to inform their policy and business decisions. Each three-year partnership supports improved building energy performance data and identification of opportunities for efficiency improvements in their jurisdictions.
Partners will use the SEED Platform to combine data from multiple sources, clean and validate it, and share the information with others. They will also demonstrate the economic and environmental benefits of energy efficiency, track program activities, and target investments. The Energy Department will support partners by providing:
- Assistance with the initial setup and implementation of the SEED Platform
- Ongoing technical support, business process support, complimentary hosting services
- Access to a peer community of users and developers to share feedback and solutions
- Monthly meetings to give input on improvements that can be made to the Platform and share best practices.
The 12 partners are committed to using the SEED Platform in the following ways:
- Atlanta, GA, will help manage incoming building energy data for the city’s second benchmarking compliance deadline.
- Berkeley, CA, will collect and store data from its Building Energy Saving Ordinance for all buildings, which will connect to other local database systems.
- Cambridge, MA, will maintain a list of buildings that need to comply with the city’s Building Energy Use Disclosure Ordinance and to manage building performance data.
- The California Energy Commission will use the SEED Platform as part of the data infrastructure necessary to support implementation of California’s Assembly Bill 802.
- Houston, TX, will track municipal building energy performance data and better understand local building stock.
- Kansas City, MO, will manage municipal building performance data and private building performance data during the implementation of the city’s Energy Empowerment Ordinance.
- Montgomery County, MD, will help implement its Building Energy Benchmarking Law and track building performance data.
- New York City, NY, will continue to collect building performance data from Local Law 84 and more easily share this data between other departments.
- Orlando, FL, will track municipal building performance information and store information on local commercial building stock.
- Philadelphia, PA, will use the SEED Platform to help in the implementation of the city’s Benchmarking Ordinance and create connections between the building data and internal communications platforms
- Salt Lake City, UT, will continue to use the SEED Platform to better understand local building stock and generate a more accurate and complete database of buildings.
- Washington, DC, will continue to use the SEED Platform to track and store information from the city’s benchmarking ordinance, as well as to share the information with other agencies and other connected tools.
As cities and states execute work plans to help implement benchmarking and building performance tracking, each will highlight proven strategies and successes through best practice sharing. The Energy Department will feature this work in the Better Buildings Solution Center.
National nonprofits and industry organizations, including the Institute for Market Transformation, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, National Resources Defense Council, National State Energy Officials, and the National League of Cities, have also joined as allies to help promote the Collaborative’s goals, activities, and lessons learned.
Better Buildings aims to make commercial, public, industrial, and residential buildings 20 percent more energy efficient over the next decade. This means saving hundreds of dollars on energy bills, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and creating thousands of jobs.
Through Better Buildings, public and private sector organizations across the country are working together to share and replicate positive gains in energy efficiency. Visit the Better Buildings Solution Center to learn more about partner results, showcase projects, and innovative solutions that are being shared with others.
