Recognising the best of the best

Across the board, Buildings Alive’s clients consistently deliver good building energy performance, and are rewarded through reduced energy costs, maintenance costs and improved tenant comfort. These are all great performance measurements when looking inward – at the operations of a single building. But what happens when you compare how one building is are tracking against others?

Since we started in 2012, Buildings Alive has enabled building operators to compare their performance against nearby buildings, those of similar ratings or others in the same owner/manager portfolio and under comparable weather and occupancy conditions.

In early 2017 we implemented analytical support for comparisons against science-based energy performance targets. In the last 18 months, we’ve seen individual buildings and whole portfolios achieve even more energy savings (and cost reductions) through thinking about how to achieve targets.

But where does a building operator aim after they have scored their best ever performance and are regularly hitting their targets and realising their potential?

Over the last few months, Buildings Alive has been evolving its thinking about how to recognise truly exemplary building energy performance achievements by building operators. We’ve implemented a new feature, “best in class” analysis, which provides a wider view and broader context for building energy performance when compared against a group of similar buildings.

The buildings in a “class” are not necessarily geographically close, nor are they within the same client portfolio. What they do have in common is a similar set of electro-mechanical attributes, relationships of those attributes to energy consumption patterns, and similar operating characteristics under comparable climatic and occupancy conditions.

When a building achieves “best in class” status, its immediately visible to the building operator (and often to their supervisors and portfolio managers):

Wow! Yesterday your building used an incredible 40% less electricity than the baseline expectation and beat its best performance by 25%. This result is 8% beyond anything we’ve ever seen from a comparable building under comparable conditions… anywhere in the world! Were you happy with how the building operated? We’d love to know if you changed anything to achieve this amazing result.

Buildings Alive’s new “best in class” feature allows high achievers to be compared meaningfully to others and recognised as building energy performance leaders on a global scale.