Portfolio-scale Building Energy Rating (PBER) Platform

There exists a lack of integrated software solutions for enabling the administration of scalable, cost-effective, and engagement-oriented energy efficiency (EE) programs. While solutions for managing individual aspects of EE programs (e.g. benchmarking, auditing) exist, they are highly disjointed and do not easily integrate with publicly- available tools developed by the Department of Energy that offer valuable, data-driven insights for improving EE. Furthermore, they are not easily customizable, are cost-prohibitive when applied to portfolio scales, and require integration with costly customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to distribute stale insights to building owners. As a result, municipalities, utilities, and private organizations are resorting to ad hoc approaches to EE program management that are costly and less impactful. These limitations significantly hinder the adoption of EE technologies across the country. PBER will enable the next generation of EE programs to leverage cutting-edge data integration, analytics, and outreach capabilities to spur EE improvements across large building portfolios. By uniquely facilitating portfolio- level management of building assets, measures, and energy data, PBER will accelerate market adoption of energy benchmarking and auditing programs through which advanced data collection and analytical tools developed by the Department of Energy (e.g., Audit Template, BS2.0, DoE Asset Score, OpenStudio) will be applied. The centralization of EE programs will generate massive efficiencies that reduce the cost of program administration and integration with DoE tools and standards will enable a new class of insights that are significantly more effective at informing EE improvement strategies. Finally, PBER will enable these insights to reach an unprecedented number of building owners and operators through novel public profiles through which engagement metrics will be tracked. In Phase I, Maalka will develop PBER, a fully functioning end-to-end cloud-based platform that integrates data across several services (BS2.0, Audit Template, Asset Score) and input formats (API, CSV, XLS, XML) to enable valuable building and portfolio-level performance and asset tracking capabilities. Integration with DoE standards and tools will enable a new class of insights that will be significantly more effective in spurring building owners to invest in EE, by providing targeted actions and enabling project prioritizations across portfolios. PBER will also be deployed across two large municipal portfolios to demonstrate its impact and efficiencies, and to collect feedback through user interviews that will be used to refine the platform and prepare it to scale into the market in Phase II. In Phase II, Maalka will use the feedback from Phase I interviews and pilot deployments to refine and expand PBER and prepare it for mass market adoption. Maalka will work with partners to rapidly deploy PBER and transform the way that EE programs are administered across the United States. Beyond the previously covered use-cases, PBER will: (1) Enable utilities to engage commercial and residential customers with targeted incentive offerings and energy-use reduction strategies, resulting in cost and emissions savings through the avoidance of new power plant construction, (2) Strengthen urban resiliency by providing municipal governments with comprehensive building datasets and portfolio-level analytical tools that can be leveraged to inform building codes and policies as well as manage emergency responses, (3) Facilitate new EE financing and investment frameworks by financial institutions by providing more integrated building performance and asset information, and (4) Help educate the next generation of data scientists focused on energy efficiency and building operations.