ABSTRACT
This Chapter presents the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) approach to providing the national energy performance rating system through commercial third-party hosts. The energy performance rating system was developed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the EPA and provides building owners, operators, and energy managers with a way to benchmark commercial buildings to effectively and quickly communicate whole-building energy performance. Ratings are obtained by manually entering specific building data into EPA’s Portfolio Manager, an on-line software application made freely available to the public through the EPA’s Web site. While this energy performance rating system has been successfully introduced and accepted into the market, a broader application is now being explored. EPA is currently working with commercial energy information vendors to automate benchmarking. By automating the process, it becomes more realistic for organizations with large portfolios to assess their opportunities for improvement, prioritize upgrades across their portfolios, and realize significant financial and environmental savings.
