Utilities usually represent the largest component of facilities costs. In a rollup of headquarters sites the breakdown of major cost components is shown in Figure 1.
Filters: Type of facility (Office)
Provided courtesy of FM BENCHMARKING.
These percentages will change somewhat depending on your facility type and your facility but utility costs will normally either be the first or sometimes second largest cost component.
Assume you are considering what improvements you could make to your facility to obtain more efficient energy use (this is often what happens when you’ve just received your “year-end” electric utility bill). It would be appropriate to know how similar facilities compare to yours. Your facility could be doing just fine, but maybe you need to invest in some energy savings projects to reduce costs.
Comparisons with a peer group are appropriate in making the correct decisions—if your facility is in line with your peers, then you are probably good without making changes; but if it’s underperforming, then there is work to do. So how do you define your peers? We’ll show you how to do it through use of filters. Along the way, we’ll learn that some filters are appropriate some of the time, but may not be other times.
While the natural instinct is to turn on lots of filters, this will greatly reduce the number of buildings you can compare yours to, so it’s best not to apply a filter if its impact will be minimal.
Utilities can be measured in two ways: consumption and costs. While there may be a few things that can be done to reduce the costs of your energy, it is much more effective to benchmark your energy consumption and develop improvements and programs to reduce the usage (rather than by looking at costs). However, comparing your energy consumption may give you the wrong perspective on your performance unless the comparisons are made with a relevant peer group.
Figure 2, for example, presents a chart showing the KWH/area for office facilities.
Filters: Type of facility (Office)
Provided courtesy of FM BENCHMARKING.
This allows you to see at a glance how well your facilities are utilizing electricity compared to other office buildings. There are 440 buildings in this peer group with a median KWH utilization of 26.57 KWH/GSF and a first quartile performance of 17.4 KWH/GSF. By looking at, and comparing similar types of facilities, you will be able to make intelligent “data-driven” decisions. Our facility is running at an annual rate of 32.62 KWH/GSF, which is near the middle of the third quartile (somewhat more energy consumption than the median company).
It is interesting to note that if we take away the “office building” filter, the median goes up to 27.88 KWH/GSH—somewhat higher, but not significant.
But there are more filters we can add to the peer group than just the type of the facility. The example office building is in a “Hot-Dry” climate and we should see what happens to our peer group when we turn on this filter. There are 50 buildings in this sample so it is enough for a valid comparison.
Filters: Type of facility (Office), Geographic Location (Hot-Dry)
Provided courtesy of FM BENCHMARKING.
Figure 3 shows a higher median of 45.53 KWH/GSF compared with office buildings in all climates. From this data it appears that climate has a significant impact on electric consumption since our building’s performance now falls in the better half of the second quartile.
While some improvements may be appropriate, they need to be targeted and further study on systems and user education may be appropriate. Or we may decide that this performance is acceptable and we don’t need to see any further improvements.
We note that if our building were in a Mixed Temperature environment (whether the humidity be humid or marine), the median energy usage is 26.30 KWH/GSF, which is nearly identical to the number for office buildings without the climate filter.
Since by adding the climate filter, the number of buildings in our “filter set” was reduced, if it turns out that another filter may be needed, we should take that into account, and turn off the climate filter. We certainly should do that if our building were in a Mixed Temperature environment.
Lessons learned:
- Don’t use a filter if it isn’t needed.
- Climate has impact on Energy Consumption in Hot, Dry environments, and less impact in Mixed Temperature environments.
- Offices as a building type do not often have a significant impact on Energy Consumption.