Key Energy Data Hit Hard by Federal Budget Cuts

By Tristan Roberts

Tracking the energy performance of commercial buildings—not an easy feat—just got even harder. Followers of the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) have been rocked by two recent announcements about the state of the survey, a program of the Energy Information Administration (EIA) at the Department of Energy. EIA announced that the 2007 survey data was not up to its statistical standards and would not be released, and that the 2011 survey was suspended as a result of budget cuts made by Congress in April 2011. The survey is normally conducted every four years, so the 2003 data set will continue indefinitely to be the most recent available.

The only program of its kind, CBECS gathers a massive amount of hard data on energy use of all kinds within the nation’s commercial building stock. The 2003 survey looked at 5,200 buildings, representing about 72 billion square feet of space. The data is used, among other things, to support energy-efficiency benchmarking in a variety of contexts, including the LEED rating systems, the 2030 Challenge, Energy Star Portfolio Manager and Target Finder, and energy modeling tools.

“It’s dismaying,” said Mark Frankel, technical director for the New Buildings Institute, in response to the news. “There’s more interest now in actual building performance than there's ever been before,” he said. Noting the rise of energy efficiency programs and building performance disclosures, Frankel asked, “How are we going to know how well we're doing” without new CBECS data?

Tom Leckey, director of the Office of Energy Consumption and Efficiency Statistics at EIA, told EBN that the fates of the 2007 and the 2011 CBECS surveys are not directly related, but stem from a common issue: money.

Leckey said that during the data-gathering portion of the 2007 study, which took place in 2008, EIA was under budgetary constraints, and allowed a contractor “to use a third-party list of information to save money on a relatively costly part of the survey.” The choice amounted to an experimental sampling method that EIA wouldn’t have chosen if it had had more latitude, Leckey said. “The method itself has some support in the statistics community,” he noted, but “because it was not implemented well, it made it impossible to come to a statistically valid conclusion.” The 2007 data, which Leckey estimates cost $6–$8 million, will not be released.

Leckey said that three months into the 2011 survey, which is a 30-month project, the CBECS team was “excited and confident” and had returned to a survey methodology it was comfortable with. That turned to “disappointment,” he says, when the April 2011 federal budget compromise cut 14% of EIA’s budget and EIA decided to bring CBECS to a standstill. He noted that the team could resume work quickly if the 2012 budget is more favorable. However, CBECS is labor- and travel-intensive: Leckey estimates that the 2011 survey would cost $8–$12 million to complete.

The frank public announcement about the program’s plight may be an attempt on the part of EIA staff to generate a groundswell of support for providing those funds—which are miniscule in the context of the overall federal budget.

Among the disappointments Frankel feels about the lack of forthcoming CBECS data is a lack of resolution around a key trend: is our new building stock getting more efficient? “The stuff we built in the ’70s and ’80s was the worst, while in the ’90s and 2000s there’s some indication that we may have turned the corner” according to the 2003 CBECS data, he explained. However, earlier CBECS surveys have also indicated that newer building stock is more efficient than 10–15-year-old buildings, so we don’t know if the improvements since the 1990s are related to building age, or an industry shift.

Frankel said that he expected the private sector to increasingly take up the slack in building performance tracking (see several such initiatives in “Measuring Energy Use in Buildings: Do Our Metrics Really Add Up?” EBN May 2011). Despite the disappointment about CBECS, he said, “While it’s nice to have a representative sample, there's a lot of people that are really hung up on the idea that without that we can’t make progress.” Frankel notes, “Without that we can't track progress, but we can certainly make progress.”

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