Date: October 19, 2015

For the past two years, the Better Buildings Energy Data Accelerator has been supporting pairs of local governments and their local utility companies to help building owners gain access to their building energy data. Partners in the EDA committed to providing energy data to at least 20% of commercial and multi-tenant building owners by the end of 2015 with a streamlined and easy to use approach. Owners who have access to their energy expenditure data are able to use this to make data driven-decision about their building. However data access has been difficult to implement due to the lack of clear value propositions for the utilities to change their systems. The Energy Data Accelerator is taking a hands-on approach with this initiative, enlisting partner municipalities who then engage their building owners as stakeholders. The EDA program offers continuous support through the 2 years of the program as well as recognition for successful partners during the annual Better Building Summit and at the end of the program. The EDA provided working group to offer a platform for the partners to discuss challenges and solutions. Multiple webinars have been used to share the progress with the entire group and additional support is provided to partners when needed. Success is measured with intermediate milestones throughout the program. Throughout the past two years, the EDA’s partners have leveraged the partner pairs to engage building stakeholders to overcome technical barriers of aggregating and communicating data, upgrading data systems, and introducing new data organization tools.