Modeling the Decarbonization Potential of a Time-of-Use Building Energy Benchmarking Model at the Urban Scale

Urban decarbonization targets and building performance standards are two ambitious policy packages that are rapidly being adopted by cities around the world. In order to evaluate relative energy efficiency in buildings many cities use a process known as building energy benchmarking. The output of energy benchmarking is useful for cities to determine what buildings are most inefficient in addition to providing data on estimated building-level greenhouse gas emissions. However, energy benchmarking often uses annual data to assess building performance and therefore may fail to capture insights on time-varying energy use and associated emissions. Without a more comprehensive view of energy usage and associated real-time emissions, current benchmarking methods and building performance standards are unlikely to accurately evaluate the decarbonization potential of urban buildings. Although there has been a growing interest in time-granular benchmarking the applications are limited due to concerns surrounding the collection and processing of such data. We utilize annual hourly data from a proof-of-concept hourly benchmarking platform to demonstrate the feasibility of time-of-use energy benchmarking. This data allows us to evaluate the performance of various benchmarking methods and building performance standards across different levels of energy use data temporal granularity. This analysis examines data at two scales: (1) inclusive of the buildings enrolled in the proof-of-concept and (2) extrapolated to all commercial buildings in New York City. The results are expected to demonstrate the value of shifting policy toward time-of-use benchmarking and its potential to help accelerate decarbonization of the urban built environment.