Simple Energy Benchmarking for Existing Office Buildings

Clients/investors are interested in the feasibility of building energy retrofit before they determine whether to perform an energy retrofit to their buildings or not. During an intial stage of the feasibility study, the level of the target building's energy efficiency should be addressed for clients/investors in a credible manner. Currently, there have been many studies with regard to building energy benchmarking methodologies. Such studies have been based on peer-comparison in terms of EUI (Energy Use Intensity, ), an aggregated sum of building energy. In this paper, the authors present a new simple approach so called "energy-scope" for non-residential existing buildings. The energy-scope uses a box-plot to graphically represent the relative energy ranking of the target building. The main difference between the previous approaches and our approach is that it provides more detailed and meaningful information, e.g. monthly ranking in terms of energy type (gas, electricity) as well as energy systems (heating, cooling). The approach was applied to three existing buildings and benchmarking analyses for the buildings are presented in the paper. The approach can help clients/investors make rational decision at the intial stage of the energy retrofit.