Building Energy Performance Analytics on Cloud as a Service

Reducing energy consumption, improving energy efficiency, and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are among the most important initiatives in today's world. Occupied buildings consume a substantial amount of energy, mounting to about 40% of overall energy consumption in most countries. The majority of the world's population either lives or works in buildings; therefore, everybody can contribute in reducing energy consumption, controlling GHG emissions, and mitigating climate change and its potential impact. We developed an analytical tool that can assist building owners, facility managers, operators, and tenants of buildings in assessing, benchmarking, diagnosing, tracking, forecasting, simulating, and optimizing energy consumption in building portfolios. Furthermore, for greater dissemination, we have made this analytic service available on demand in a flexible cloud environment. Cloud is an efficient and effective medium to provide building energy analytics capability to various functions and people in a variety of roles in buildings without investing a substantial amount of money in hardware, software, and information technology infrastructure. We present results of the building energy analytics developed for K–12 public school buildings and a commercial office building complex.