Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Iowa Energy Center’s Pilot Benchmarking project collected building and energy consumption data from over 1200 public buildings across Iowa. I worked from the beginning to the end of this project as a Sector Leader, working with public organization contacts (data owners), utility companies (historic data collectors), as well as the Weidt Group, the company that developed and hosts the B3 Benchmarking system.
My main focus throughout the project was data collection. Initially we focused on building attributes (square-footage, year of construction, utility meters, etc.). We created a hierarchy through which we organized all of the data for the public organizations; sectors (state, community college, city, and county), organizations, sites, and finally, buildings. Within each organization, there are typically multiple sites that have multiple buildings. However, many organizations that have multiple buildings per site had a somewhat problematic relationship between buildings and utility meters; namely, multiple buildings assigned per meter.
A main outcome from this project, and perhaps more broad future projects, is to understand individual building consumption for the purposes of identifying those that are consuming more than such a building should. The B3 Benchmarking system has a fixed number of building types, and takes the unique building attributes to calculate a benchmark, and this is compared to the actual consumption to assign a grade report. When a meter is exclusive to a single building, this allows for that building to be understood alone. However, as is the case for many of the buildings in the project, if a meter is shared between multiple buildings, that collection of buildings can be understood as a group, or site, but not at the individual building level. Understanding consumption at the building level is important for making a change, if necessary, to the building’s construction or operation in an effort to decrease energy consumption.
Due to the operation of the public organizations, especially those that have buildings as part of a ‘campus’, it is much simpler for accounting purposes to have a single meter for an entire campus. There are cases of dedicated energy plants that house all heating and cooling facilities. This is a great efficiency technique, but it makes it more difficult to pin-point where maintenance or modifications to the operations of a building may be needed. Due to this problem, a great amount of the buildings in the project do not benefit from the B3 Benchmarking system at the building level, but at the campus, or site level.
This project was all about gathering information down to the building level, but the most extreme scenario for the purposes of understanding energy use and pin-pointing over-use would be by having meters placed for each individual component to a building that consumes energy; metering things such as A/C units, fans, computers, and lighting while also including pressure and temperature sensors throughout a building. This, however, is far from becoming a reality in Iowa’s public buildings, and is probably overkill and borders invading privacy.
In its current state, the way energy data is collected, and transferred from the utility companies to the B3 Benchmarking system is unnecessarily tedious. The project was run by the Iowa Energy Center, the B3 system is hosted and operated by the Weidt Group, and the historic consumption data that is owned by the public organizations and is stored by the utility companies. All of these separate parties made the transfer of data from the utilities to the B3 system quite complicated (with authorization forms generated by the IEC, sent to the organizations to be signed and sent back to the IEC, to then be presented to the utility company when the data was requested for the B3 Benchmarking system). These are very long run-on sentences, but it helps to illustrate the many hoops that were involved to achieve the final goal (and honestly, I’m just getting started with the headaches involved with dealing with the utility companies…did you know that some of them change the meter and account numbers regularly?).
In my opinion many things must be developed before a worthwhile system can be put in place that can easily help facility managers to curb unnecessary energy consumption. This system does work, but it has too many tedious processes involved that can eventually become automated. From what I observed, there were only a handful of ‘data owners’ that were active and excited participants in the project. The majority of the other participants were part of the project, but due to a combination of factors, it was like pulling teeth to get information from them, or to sign the data authorization forms. Given some more development, and an internal desire by public organizations to lower energy consumption, I believe this system can be extremely useful for building managers in Iowa’s public organizations, as well as homeowners at some point.
The full final technical report for the project can be found below: