Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey Back on Schedule

The Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CEBCS) provides valuable information about the U.S. commercial building stock and its energy consumption. The 2007 CEBCS was canceled due to a bad data collection method (proving cheaper is not always better), and the 2011 CEBCS was suspended due to funding cuts at the Department of Energy. You may recall an outcry from this blogger and organizations like IES and the American Institute of Architects about this. Not only is the information critically important to the lighting industry, in my view if you don’t measure, you can’t enact good policy.

Some good news today: The Energy Information Administration (EIA), the data collection arm of the Department of Energy, has announced that it has resumed work on the next CEBCS. EIA plans to field the survey in April 2013, collecting data for reference year 2012. EIA expects to publish the first results of the survey in the first half of 2014.

Follow updates on the development of the 2012 CEBCS, and access free data for previous iterations of the Survey, here.

Craig DiLouie

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