by Brianna Crandall — March 23, 2011—The Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) has published the full Display Energy Certificate (DEC) Register for all U.K. public buildings, making it publicly available in one place for the first time. It can be downloaded from a new Open Data page on the CSE Web site.
The dataset includes the address, floorspace, heat and power consumption, carbon emissions, and energy efficiency rating of 40,000 sites. Until now, the information could only be obtained for one building at a time, and only in PDF format, making strategic assessments and estate-wide analysis almost impossible, notes the organization.
CSE obtained the data (which it says is not personally or commercially sensitive) from the U.K. Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) under the Environmental Information Regulations, building on the efforts of BBC journalist Martin Rosenbaum, who obtained a partial dataset.
The Display Energy Certificate information has been collected by CLG following the introduction in 2008 of a law requiring all public buildings of over 1,000 sqm to be assessed for their energy performance. Each building is also required to display this information in the form of certificates now seen on central and local government buildings, hospitals, schools, plus some leisure centers, museums and theaters across the U.K.
CSE’s Head of Research Joshua Thumim explains why CSE has taken this step: “This data belongs in the public domain. It took a lot of time and effort to persuade CLG to release it to us, and we are now pleased to be able to share it so no one else has to jump through all of those hoops. We hope that researchers, policy-makers, public agencies and others working in the field of sustainable energy can make effective use of the full dataset now that it is finally available. In that spirit, we’d be interested in hearing about the different uses people find for the data.”
A building’s Display Energy Certificate presents its energy performance as an “Operational Rating.” This compares the CO2 emissions attributable to the energy consumed on that particular site to benchmark (i.e. “typical”) emissions for a building of that type. The comparison is expressed as a percentage, so the lower the rating, the better the energy efficiency performance. Values are mapped to a scale from A to G, where 0 to 25 = A and greater than 150 = G.
