Performance Monitoring and Evaluation

For detailed information, read Procedure for Measuring and Reporting Commercial Building Energy Performance.

The Commercial Building Initiative (CBI) is working to standardize the measurement and characterization of building energy performance through performance metrics. Ongoing development of these metrics advance CBI's research goals by informing the effectiveness of energy efficiency measures in real buildings and highlighting opportunities to improve their performance. Various tiers of metrics are available for different users. This page provides an overview of the objectives in performance metrics and key documents to help in measuring and reporting. Some of the documents are available as Adobe Acrobat PDFs.

Performance Metrics Objectives

Performance metrics deal specifically with building energy consumption and on-site energy production. To be useful, the industry must agree on a standard definition of the metrics. There must also be procedures for collecting data, ensuring data quality, and reporting data to support a building's energy performance metrics.

The Commercial Building Initiative has defined performance metrics and procedures that offer the following benefits:

Standardization: Standard definitions provide a consistent basis for comparing energy performance among buildings.
Versatility: The analysis is customized to the facility boundaries, energy configuration, analysis goals, and analysis budget that apply to specific projects.
Efficiency: The data collection is carefully matched to the goals of the analysis and the study questions, avoiding the common pitfalls of too little or too much information.

Key Metrics Reports

The following documents offer specific information about measuring and reporting various attributes of a building's energy performance.