EnergyScoreCards Grading FAQ’s
EnergyScoreCards grades enable users to target their efforts and resources towards the buildings in their portfolio with the greatest potential for savings. This is done by comparing buildings to their ‘peer’ buildings, assigning grades of A, B, C or D according to how their energy and water use stacks up to these peers. Our new algorithm strives to improve on our concept of a ‘peer’ building by more closely comparing buildings to those that have similar needs.
For more information about the new grading algorithm itself please click here.
Why is my building’s grade different?
The new grade is a more accurate picture of how your building is performing compared to peer buildings. You can think of this new grade as a building’s potential for savings. So a C or a D building likely has a lot of ‘low-hanging fruit’ measures that are faster and cheaper to implement, while an A or B building is performing well relative to peer buildings – it may still have opportunities to lower energy and water use, but they may take a bit more investment of time and money.
My building’s grades improved with the new algorithm, what does that mean?
Your building is likely of a type that tends to use more energy, so when it’s compared to other buildings like it, its relative energy use is not quite as substantial. This includes older, small buildings or buildings with lots of amenity space.
My building’s grades got worse with the new algorithm, what does that mean?
Your building likely is the type that tends to use less energy, so when compared to other similar buildings, we can see that there is more room for improvement. These include newer, large buildings without a lot of amenity space and all-tenant-paid garden style complexes.
What does a grade change mean for my site staff and how do I communicate this change to them?
If you’re already using EnergyScoreCards grades to motivate or inform site staff, this shouldn’t be too big of a change. Most grades either won’t change at all or by much. For buildings that do have a larger change in grades, it likely won’t be too much of a surprise to site staff, since they know your buildings best. The most important thing to communicate is that we’re continually updating our models to make the grades more useful, and this latest change is really aimed at making the grades as actionable as possible, so buildings that now have Cs or Ds should have a lot of potential for savings.
Why did the algorithm change?
We’re constantly updating our software and modeling algorithms to incorporate the most state-of-the-art methods possible. This latest change was also driven by a lot of feedback we’ve received from clients, both in terms of grades that didn’t make sense and wanting tighter regional comparison.
Why did only some of my building’s grades change?
Since this upgrade is really a refinement of our current model, many grades won’t change much or at all. It’s also possible that your overall energy grade might stay the same, but end use grades (heating, cooling, baseload electric and baseload fossil fuel) might change. This is because the end-use and overall energy grades are calculated separately, and could differ for many reasons, such as:
- The distribution of energy use (and energy needs) between end-uses is often not equal.
- There can be no energy used for a specific end-use, giving a property an end-use grade of ‘N/A’, but that means less energy overall that will factor into the overall grade.
- You can’t tell if you’re on the border between two grades, so you might be just barely a ‘B’ for end-uses, but just barely an ‘A’ for overall energy.
- Certain types of fuel are more efficient than others, so a property may have an efficient fossil fuel baseload score, but compared to properties that have those end-uses filled by electric, may not be as efficient overall.
- Depending on the payment code, the metrics for end-uses may be measured against different building areas. For example, for TTOO buildings, the cooling index (and grade) is normalized by common area, whereas the overall energy index is normalized by total multi-family area.
How does this impact energy improvement recommendations I’ve already received from Bright Power (such as through an energy audit)?
EnergyScoreCards provides a high level analysis of building energy use. While EnergyScoreCards grades are an important input for our engineers, there are a lot of factors that go into producing the recommendations that go into an energy audit report, including equipment surveys, conversations with site staff, observations from a site visit, energy modeling, and our experience upgrading similar buildings. The energy improvement recommendations (or energy conservation measures) presented in an energy audit were custom created for your building using a lot more data than is available in EnergyScoreCards. EnergyScoreCards is a great place to keep track of these recommendations and to measure the actual energy performance improvements after you have implemented them.
How does this compare to Portfolio Manager’s Energy Star score calculation?
Portfolio Manager also uses a Machine Learning Regression algorithm to calculate their Energy Star score. However, we’re using a different type of algorithm that performs much better with different types of building data, and we’re ‘training’ our algorithm on a much larger database, making it both more accurate and better able to properly model many different types of buildings. We’re also only comparing buildings to those in their climate region, and we have a custom model for each of those regions. The EnergyScoreCards grading model also grades by energy end-uses (heating, cooling, baseload electric and baseload fossil fuel) in addition to total energy and water use, so you can see which parts of your energy consumption have the biggest potential for improvement. Finally, we’re able to grade buildings based on both the owner-paid portion of utility use or whole-building data, whereas whole-building data is required for an Energy Star score.
When is this rolling out?
October 2016
Will historical grades change to the new algorithm?
Yes.
Will I be able to access old grades?
Not on the EnergyScoreCards website. Your EnergyScoreCards Energy Analyst can supply you with a spreadsheet showing your Most Recent Year grades before and after the change for reference.