A Guide for Hotels: Boosting Profits with Energy Efficiency & Conservation
Planning an Energy Program: Benchmarking
Without establishing a baseline for energy performance, facility managers have no way of knowing a building's potential for saving energy and money.
There are two primary ways to establish baseline data:
- Use an energy accounting system to analyze historical energy use, carefully taking into account any changes in operations, extreme seasonal weather or other factors that might affect the energy use intensity or energy costs at a building or property.
- Model energy use in the building, also referred to as calibrated simulation. This involves the use of complex computer software to predict energy use in a building.
Often, energy efficiency and energy conservation measures are adopted to address discernible problems, such as uncomfortable indoor temperatures or wide fluctuations in utility bills. An energy accounting system that tracks the energy performance of a building and compares this to baseline data can help detect and confirm such problems, like malfunctioning cooling equipment that appears as a spike in energy demand of the heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) system.
In addition to analyzing energy performance against a baseline, owners and managers can use benchmarking to compare a building with properties of similar characteristics, such as climate, size, operations and age.