Information exchange requirements for energy audits in the commercial building retrofit sector

With an increasing demand for building energy performance, energy audits are being adopted more often by commercial building owners in order to determine the feasibility of building retrofits. There are many resources available for energy audits such as suggested data collection forms. However, there is not a standard that defines the information exchange for the energy auditing processes, which makes it difficult to leverage the information exchange to benefit downstream energy modeling. This paper describes the research on a standardized input data structure for energy audits in order to help define the energy auditing protocol for retrofit buildings. There search defines the standard required input data structure for Level II energy audits based on the content analysis of the current audit data templates and energy modeling input requirements. By aligning the data with the main energy modeling software tools, the consistent categories of data for energy audits are extracted. The benefits of the adopted approach are presented and future research trajectories are outlined.