Henry (& others) should have read the Development of a California Commercial Building Energy Benchmarking Database & Energy Benchmarking In Commercial Office Buildings DOE papers. They said what NBI said before they said it. :)
"Points-Based Rating Systems, including (LEED), do not allow comparisons against other buildings, rather, they provide standards and guidelines to measure how efficient and environmentally friendly a facility is and compared it to best-practice standards."
"Statistical distributions of office building EUIs developed from CBECS data can be used for comparing the performance of an individual building to others within its respective census division. Median EUIs are more reliable comparators when it is desired to compare the energy use of a sample of local buildings to CBECS census division statistics. Averages can be strongly influenced by a small number of buildings with excessive individual EUIs. This occurs in the CBECS database and will occur in local sampling of office buildings."
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Eric Johnson
271 thumbs up
September 14, 2010 - 1:45 pm
"LEED certification has never depended on actual energy use, and it's not going to," he says. "You can use as much energy as you want and report it and keep your plaque." The Existing Building rating system certainly does require actual energy performance.
Marc Mondor
PrincipalEvolve LLC
59 thumbs up
March 8, 2011 - 6:05 pm
EA,
Any opinions on the use of the median vs. the mean as an indicator? I'd like to see the mean EUI for certain building types, is this available within the CBECS database?
It is not clear to me how the median is a better indicator --especially concerning energy use--shouldn't the "excessive users" be fully accounted for?
Eric Johnson
271 thumbs up
March 8, 2011 - 6:49 pm
Marc,
I would say that comparing median and mean aren't normally a good way to go. You can check out the following link for a discussion about median and mean. http://www.buildinggreen.com/live/index.cfm/2008/9/2/Lies-Damn-Lies-and-...
If you're trying to find the "best" average for comparison and your data has large outliers it would be more appropriate to use the median number.
Go to CBECS and analyze the microdata (or just use Energystar) and review the following papers for additional insight on energy benchmarking. California Commercial Building Energy Benchmarking Database & Energy Benchmarking In Commercial Office Buildings DOE papers.