Gateway:Buildings

Building Energy Technologies

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 Buildings Energy Technologies gateway is your single source of freely accessible information on energy usage in the building industry as well as tools to improve efficiencies.

Information Portals

Green Building Standards

In this section, you will find information about U.S. green building standards.

• http://www.usgbc.org The Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) is a 501 c3 non-profit organization committed to a prosperous and sustainable future for our nation through cost-efficient and energy-saving green buildings. ^[1]
• http://www.leed.net LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is an internationally-recognized green building certification system. Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) in March 2000, LEED provides building owners and operators with a framework for identifying and implementing practical and measurable green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions. ^[2]

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.

• Municipalities and Renewable Energy Opportunities
• Building Technologies Information Sectors
  • County Climate Zones (3141)
  • ASHRAE Climate Zones
• Utilities

The Built Environment

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

• Commercial Buildings
  • CBECS Building Types
  • Technical Buildings Publications
  • EnergyPlus Building Models
  • Commercial Reference Buildings
  • EIA Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS): Provides information on the stock of U.S. commercial buildings as well as their energy-related building characteristics, energy consumption and expenditures. ^[3]
• 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.^[4]
    • 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 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.