Big Buildings and Big Data: Do Energy Disclosure Policies Impact Energy Use over Time?

Given ambitious goals set by cities to reduce carbon emissions by as much as 80 percent by 2050, rapid progress is needed in improving building energy efficiency. This paper provides the first rigorous empirical examination of the effects of energy disclosure policies on building energy consumption over time by analyzing matched energy data from 2010 to 2015. These data, from NYC’s Local Law 84 benchmarking ordinance and the NYC PLUTO land use database, contain six years of detailed information on energy use, occupancy and use characteristics, and other property attributes for over 15,000 large buildings, resulting in a total feature space of more than 10,000,000 data points. Time series analysis and clustering techniques are used to identify common attributes of buildings with similar observed performance over time. The counterfactual scenario, to control for energy use changes in buildings not subject to mandatory disclosure, is established through the comparison of the normalized changes over time in energy use from buildings subject to the reporting mandate with a sample of matched peer buildings that voluntarily reported energy data, derived from a sample of 3,000 buildings collected through the Urban Land Institute’s Greenprint Center. Our findings reveal that buildings subject to mandatory disclosure have reduced their energy consumption more than those voluntarily reporting data, although more extensive analysis is needed to identify causal links.