Information exchange requirements for building walk-through energy audits

Energy audits are generally considered the initial step of energy retrofits projects, paving the way for more detailed energy analysis and design. However, there are few standards to define the input and output data for energy auditing, making it difficult to leverage the data from an energy audit in the initial feasibility stage. Moreover, with the increasing use of building information modeling, the information exchange should be aligned with the future potential to support building information modeling implementation. This article describes the research on a standardized data structure for walk-through energy audits to help define the information exchange between energy audit data collection and energy analysis tools, namely EnergyPlus. The building information modeling-enabled energy modeling information exchange requirements were also compared with the current energy audit data structure to identify the gaps and overlaps. This research found that only 41% of collected data could be transferred for energy modeling, and only 26% of the input data that are required by EnergyPlus were captured by current energy audit practice. The alignment of data was even less when compared with the information exchange requirement of the building information modeling-enabled energy modeling. The reasons for the low alignment are discussed in this article and the future research directions are suggested.