Gateway:Buildings

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Buildings provide shelter for nearly everything we do—we work, live, learn, govern, heal, worship, and play in buildings—and they require enormous energy resources. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, homes and commercial buildings use nearly three quarters of the electricity in the United States. Opportunities abound for reducing the huge amount of energy consumed by buildings, but discovering those opportunities requires compiling substantial amounts of data and information. The Building Technologies Information gateway is your single source of freely accessible information on energy usage in the building industry as well as tools to improve efficiencies.

Contents

Information Portals

Building Design Processes and Influences

In this section, you will find information about the variables that influence a building, including incentives, utilities, weather, climate, and location/ground temperature.

The Built Environment

This section contains information on factors that define a building, such as occupancy.

  • Commercial Buildings
  • Residential Buildings
    • DOE Buildings Energy Data Book: Presents statistics on residential and commercial building energy consumption. Data tables contain statistics related to construction, building technologies, energy consumption, and building characteristics.
  • International Buildings
    • Sweden Building Data: For several years now, the Swedish Energy Agency has been working, under the name of the STIL2 project, to improve the general level of awareness and knowledge of how energy is used in non-residential premises, and of how it can used more efficiently. Each year, the Agency carries out detailed surveys of energy use in about 150 representative buildings. So far, this has covered energy use in offices, schools and healthcare premises over the years 2005-2007. In addition to comparison of performance between these years, results are also compared with a similar investigation from 1990. The emphasis of the work of the STIL2 investigation is on the use of electricity.[2]
      • Sweden Building Data contains summary information from the STIL2 project. This is a representative sampling of non-residential buildings and the buildings are numbered and and exact location is not given. The county where the building is located and other general information is located on OpenEI. Additional detailed information on usage in each building is available here in a spreadsheet format.
    • Finland Building Data: Coming soon!
  • High-Performance Buildings Database: Contains in-depth information and data on high-performance, green-building projects across the United States and abroad. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is currently in the process of compiling this data. It it scheduled to be released for general consumption in the near future.

Building Performance

In this section, you will find information on building outputs, including energy usage, economics, carbon emissions, and site and source emissions.

Tools

The Tools section will contain a chart comparing the numerous tools available today on a variety of features and capabilities. Analysis and formatting are underway and the chart will be made available as soon as it is completed.

Additional Information

Building Energy Codes-Best Practices Report for APEC Economies

References

  1. ↑ EIA CBECS Building Types, U.S. Energy Information Administration (Oct 2008)
  2. ↑ Swedish Energy Agency
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Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in support of the Open Government Initiative to make energy data transparent, participatory, and collaborative.