Benchmark Your Building's Energy Consumption With ENERGY STAR® Portfolio Manager
Portfolio Manager is the ENERGY STAR® program’s free online software tool for tracking energy and water use, and rating the energy performance of selected building types. The tool enables users to:
- Track multiple energy and water meters Benchmark facilities relative to past performance
- View percent improvement in weather-normalized source energy
- Monitor energy and water costs
- Verify building energy performance
- Determine energy performance ratings
For many building types, Portfolio Manager can provide an EPA energy performance rating. EPA’s national energy performance ratings are derived from U.S. energy and facility data, and account for the impact of weather variations and key physical and operating characteristics of each building.
The Energy Star ® rating system allows owners and operators of commercial buildings to compare their buildings’ energy performance to that of similar buildings throughout the U.S. By benchmarking their entire portfolio of buildings, organizations can improve their approach to controlling energy costs by identifying top performing buildings that exemplify best practices within their organization, and by identifying below-average performers to prioritize upgrade investment opportunities.
The rating is calculated on a 1-to-100 scale using basic data regarding the buildings’ physical attributes, operating characteristics, location, and monthly energy consumption. The rating is derived by analyzing the primary drivers of facility energy consumption and their relative impact on energy use based on the survey results in the Department of Energy (DOE), Energy Information Agency’s (EIA), Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), as well as other industry-specific data sets. Using this market data
describing facility energy consumption and characteristics, EPA creates a model for each facility type, which normalizes energy use based on a facility’s specific climate, weather, space use, and energy consumption characteristics, and scores it relative to its peers.
Buildings that score a 75 or higher and maintain a healthy indoor environment are eligible to receive the ENERGY STAR® for Buildings label. Buildings eligible to receive the ENERGY STAR® label include: offices, K-12 schools, hotels, hospitals, supermarkets/grocery stores, financial centers, bank branches, court houses, warehouses, residence halls & dormitories, and medical offices.
ComEd will soon offer a web-based application that will allow Facility Managers to retrieve their whole building consumption usage data for input into the Portfolio Manager. Facility Managers will be able to query the application by providing the building address and a date range. The application will allow the Facility Manager to receive reoccurring whole building consumption usage data. In the future, there will be built-in functionality that will
allow Facility Managers to have their building usage data automatically submitted into the EPA Portfolio Manager.
For more information on this exciting new service, please call Kevin Bricknell at 630-437-3118 or send an e-mail to Kevin.Bricknell@exeloncorp.com.