Comparing apples to oranges: Energy benchmarking of supermarkets with limited data

Current approaches for benchmarking building energy consumption are either too data intensive to be feasible in practice or too data agnostic to be useful. We present a limited data approach where in, instead of using minutiae required for accurate HVAC modeling, we model the heating/cooling loads, the drivers for HVAC. This allows us to see how a building's (i) weather independent consumption compares to the optimal value and (ii) weather dependent consumption compares with its expected heating/cooling loads. Based on this two dimensional metric, we benchmark 94 geographically diverse supermarket stores and present our findings. © 2014 Authors.