by Brianna Crandall — January 16, 2017 — The Investor Confidence Project (ICP) last week announced the launch of the “Building Button,” a new tool based on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Energy Data Exchange Specification that standardizes the collection of data from energy efficiency projects, and makes it easy to share that information with investors, building owners, developers and utilities.
According to Matt Golden, ICP Director:
One of the major barriers to wide-scale adoption of energy efficiency is the hassle factor. Every investment is unique, with data lodged in incompatible spreadsheets, documents, and other digital files. The lack of uniform data standards means that transaction costs are prohibitively high. The Building Button helps solve that by establishing guidelines for all project data, streamlining the process of project development and investment.
The Building Button integrates best practices and specifications developed by ICP and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, including the Building Energy Data Exchange Specification (BEDES), into a dictionary of terms and definitions that expresses energy efficiency projects data in a common language and helps make standardized data more accessible to the market.
This allows all parties to compare specifications across multiple projects with a single click, reducing underwriting and actuarial analysis costs, building trust in energy savings, and driving market demand for energy efficiency projects. Combining the Building Button with ICP’s commercial and multifamily building protocols gives investors and building owners confidence in energy savings backed by empirical, project-level data across multiple projects.
ICP and its Investor Ready Energy Efficiency (IREE) certification standardize the way efficiency projects are developed and brought to market by incorporating industry best practices to ensure performance, as well as measurement and verification. The ICP system makes energy efficiency upgrade projects more attractive to investors and building owners alike by providing tools to assess risk more accurately, and build trust in energy savings performance and return on investment. ICP investor-ready projects and pilots are said to be at the forefront of a growing trend toward “pay for performance” (P4P) programs in five U.S. states and in the U.K.
In 2017, ICP will join Green Building Certification Inc. (GBCI) to create the first global underwriting standard for energy efficiency projects.
For more information on the Investor Confidence Project or the Building Button, visit the group’s Web site.
