What is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking involves measuring meaningful energy usage to determining how a particular building compares to others, and tracking changes over time. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2000 launched Portfolio Manager, a nationwide
benchmarking tool that uses energy usage data to provide a score on a 1-100 scale reflecting a building’s performance against comparable buildings. The score is normalized to account for regional differences in climate, operating characteristics, and other factors.

The score can be used to:

• Establish a quick snapshot of a building’s energy performance.
• Target candidate buildings for energy improvement projects.
• Monitor the ongoing performance of a building or a portfolio of buildings over time.
• Communicate with building occupants, management and ownership about a building's energy performance
• Educate landlords and tenants about their building's energy performance compared to other buildings.
  

If you are a commercial property owner Energy Benchmarking is going to be something you are going to have to become familiar with.  Energy Benchmarking consists of gathering information on your building, such as your buildings square footage, what and how the tenant spaces are used in your building, your utility bills, the utility bills of your tenants, general information about heating and air conditioning use by your tenants, the number of computers used in your building, the number of employees your tenants have, and the operational hours of your tenants.  All of this information is then put into benchmarking software such as Energy Star's Portfolio Manager or EnergyIQ. 

Once all of this information is put into the Benchmarking software it provides a ranking and compares your building's performance with similar buildings located in similar climates.  This allow you and your tenants to get a better understanding of how energy efficient your building is, and hopefully provides you with information or thoughts on how to improve the energy efficiency in your building. 

Both the state of California and the City of San Francisco are requiring commercial buildings of 5,000 sq ft or greater and respectively 10,000 sq ft or greater be benchmarked if they seek financing, lease or sell their property to prospective buyers.   Thus Energy Benchmarking is now going to become an important part of real estate transactions going forward.