Department of Energy Debuts a Buildings Performance Database

The Buildings Performance Database (BPD) from the Department of Energy is designed to ultimately make all building energy performance data public. The platform enables users to perform statistical analysis on an anonymous dataset of tens of thousands of commercial and residential buildings from across the country. Users can compare performance trends among similar buildings to identify and prioritize cost-saving energy efficiency improvements and assess the range of likely savings from these improvements.

The BPD includes:

• Actual data on tens of thousands of existing buildings — not modeled data or anecdotal evidence.
• Enables statistical analysis without revealing information about individual buildings.
• Cleanses and validates data from many sources and translates it into a standard format.

In addition, it has some analysis tools, including:

• Peer Group Tool that allows users to peruse the BPD and create peer groups based on specific building types, locations, sizes, ages, equipment and operational characteristics. Users can compare the energy use of their own building to a peer group of BPD buildings.
• Retrofit Analysis Tool allows users to analyze the savings potential of specific energy efficiency measures. Users can compare buildings that utilize one technology against peer buildings that utilize another.
• Data Table Tool allows users to generate and export statistical data about peer groups.
• Financial Forecasting Tool actually forecasts cash flows for energy efficiency projects.
• Application Programming Interface (API) that allows external software to conduct analysis of the BPD data (expect iPhone apps soon).

All the details are here.