The State of Minnesota Administrative Department hired The Weidt Group to implement a public building benchmarking program required by legislation. The goal was to capture enough information about Minnesota’s population of approximately 6,000 public buildings to identify those buildings that would yield the highest return on investment for energy-related building improvements.

The Weidt Group developed the processes and tools required to:

1. Identify and verify the entire Minnesota public building population
2. Establish communication with “data owners” for each building
3. Gather building information and energy consumption data into a single data store
4. Create software tools that analyze actual metered energy use V.S. predicted energy performance for each building

A web site lives at the heart of the Minnesota Benchmarking program. Data Owners for each building enter and verify basic building information, and also enter energy consumption data by meter. The site then creates a predictive model of the building and compares the expected energy performance against actual consumption in real time. As the site user enters data about the building, the model gains accuracy in its predictions, allowing the Data Owner to immediately identify possible data entry errors.

The web site also allows Data Owners to see the comparative performance of the entire list of buildings stack-ranked by comparison with the model.

The collected data will be used to inform investments in building energy performance, and to track savings as buildings are improved. The Minnesota Building Benchmarking web site can be seen at www.mnbenchmarking.com.