Zero Energy Commercial Buildings Consortium Endorses COMNET Normalizations for Asset Ratings

In its recent report, Analysis of Cost & Non-Cost Barriers and Policy Solutions for Commercial Buildings, the Zero Energy Commercial Buildings Consortium (CBC) seeks to capture market feedback on key barriers to energy efficiency, identify innovative strategies and successful approaches, and facilitate information and knowledge transfer among stakeholders. The report concludes that in many cases the energy efficiency industry lacks simple energy usage baselines and reliable energy performance metrics for commercial buildings. "While our knowledge of building performance is limited, it is clear we can’t make the meaningful strides to achieve broad-scale net-zero commercial buildings if we can’t answer fundamental questions about how and why energy is used. Benchmarking and performance assurance are indispensable tools that increase our knowledge of energy performance, help identify improvement opportunities and measure progress toward net-zero."

Benchmarks typically summarize building performance with a few metrics that enable comparisons among buildings of the same type. These metrics may include results from comparable (peer-group) buildings, a building compared to itself over time, best-practice references or codes, or a goal, such as net-zero. For a benchmark to be relevant and appropriate, the comparison should identify and eliminate the effect of neutral variables, those that affect total energy use but that are not being evaluated, such as operating schedule and climate. Thus the CBC recommends "that the Commercial Energy Services Network or COMNET normalization procedure for energy modeling input variables be viewed as the standard procedure used in all asset evaluation programs."