Building energy data management systems in the world: a review

Abstract

Due to the growing number of buildings with higher population and urbanisation, tracking energy consumption in buildings is essential in reducing global energy demand and carbon emissions. For that, governments and energy-related international bodies have created many databases to collect data on building energy consumption and provide energy statistics based on that. This paper focuses on reviewing building energy databases in the world to study their policy implications and applicability in reducing building energy consumption. The qualitative approach was used in this study, and highly reputed and highly cited 09 databases were selected for the review. Among them, 04 databases provide energy benchmarks for buildings under different types of categories, while 05 databases provide energy statistics only. These databases allow government authorities to monitor the energy performance of buildings, determine tax credits and incentives for energy performance, rate the buildings and prioritise low-performing buildings for setting action plans. In addition, some of those have led to revisions of building codes and received the direct involvement of the relevant stakeholders through mandatory disclosure of energy data. Organisations also use these databases for marketing purposes, highlighting their high performance and allowing them to identify performance gaps. All the databases have been developed along with energy policies at the national and international levels. Compared to developed countries, energy databases are lacking in managing energy consumption in the national building stock. Especially, there is no energy database for the Sri Lankan building sector.