“Some cities actually are expanding the [energy] disclosure requirements to more and more buildings—a greater proportion of their building stock—over time. I think that’s both an opportunity and a challenge right now. We’re in a moment of transition,” Powe notes.
Once access to building energy-consumption data is opened up for city-wide mapping, Powe says visualization of efficiencies will be much more efficient, and opportunities for investments in energy systems will be much clearer.
“It’ll be really exciting when we can marry those two things and say, ‘Here are the sections of cities that have older; undesignated; or just plain great, old buildings that really could use some investment in their energy systems.’ I think in the not distant future we’ll be able to show that city-wide and pretty easily. I think that’ll be a big deal,” he notes.
The Value of Data: Beyond Opinion
When it comes to existing buildings, the impact of gathering historical performance data and analyzing it to inform the design process can’t be overstated. Simply put, basing design decisions in retrofitting scenarios on anything other than hard numbers is a hypothetical exercise that will yield mixed results at best.
Rubel notes: “The one thing I think is important is many times building owners and architects and constructors make decisions on subjective opinions based on very little data. As we start instrumenting buildings and collecting more data that’s objective, I think it will allow us to make much better decisions on how to plan and design and build buildings because the data will be non-biased.”
For those who are in the early phases of collecting data, Landreneau says looking at occupant behavior and sub-loads represents a huge opportunity to improve building efficiency without having to necessarily engage in major renovations. However, she adds many building owners “have gone for the low-hanging fruit. They’ve already done the re-lamping and a lot of the things that were easy to do.”
Collecting more sophisticated data on energy consumption, then, becomes much more instructive, she says.
“I do think data is helpful,” Landreneau observes, “particularly when we can get nuanced data, and they understand which systems seem to be performing outside of expectations. Again, sometimes that’s a behavior issue that can be corrected without building modification. Sometimes it’s a piece of equipment that’s not working properly. I think retrocommissioning is extremely helpful.”
While utilizing Big Data is clearly a step in the right direction in terms of understanding the performance of older buildings, Powe says data mining can extend beyond that and help make them more profitable, as well.
“One thing we would love to be able to map out more information on is commercial rent, commercial vacancy,” he says. “I think that’s an area where working together we could probably show some really interesting things and show interesting opportunities. Not just opportunities for energy savings, preservation and building reuse, but for making money, for actually leasing out more buildings.”
Because, at the end of the day, what good is all the performance data and the upgrades to the existing building stock if no one knows they’re available?
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