Author's note: This post was co-authored by Cliff Majersik and Ron Nelson of the Institute for Market Transformation.

“How many LEED points can I get? Do I quality for a specific incentive?”

To energy modelers, questions like these sound like a broken record.

Yet properly used, energy modeling can provide information that optimizes a building’s energy consumption, reduces life cycle costs and even reduces first cost.

“As we strive for more efficient buildings, and our codes become more demanding, we are nearing the end of the road with how much we can squeeze out of the prescriptive energy codes,” said Cliff Majersik, executive director of the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT). “Increasingly, we are going to have to rely on performance based compliance, which will require building energy modeling.”

Today, the two biggest drivers of increased modeling demand — building owners’ need to comply with regulations and codes, and desire to comply with voluntary programs — do not necessarily best support the objective of widespread low-energy building design and operation.

Market demand was a key issue tackled at the Building Energy Modeling (BEM) Innovation Summit, a joint effort between Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), the U.S. affiliate of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA), the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and IMT. The summit sought to convene a fragmented industry to improve modeling tools, processes and capacity (read the post-summit report).

Within the next decade, demand for energy modeling could go up in an order of magnitude. However, this is predicated on several market drivers that support the best uses of building energy modeling.

Demand Driver 1: Spurring Investment

A handful of large U.S. cities and states are enacting energy efficiency benchmarking legislation for commercial buildings. Washington, D.C., for example will require buildings to disclose information via a public website on both the buildings’ target energy use and actual use based on utility bills. Disclosure of the corresponding Energy Star ratings may also be required.

These policies are game-changers, incentivizing investment in efficiency and holding design teams accountable for building performance. 

“Energy disclosure creates a positive feedback loop for architects, engineers and others to learn from job-to-job how to do better and be accountable for doing better,” Majersik said. “But it will be hard to mandate energy modeling at the current price. Currently, cost is the biggest impediment in the growth of energy modeling.”

Demand Driver 2: Increased Standardization Reduces Costs

Often, potential customers perceive the costs for energy modeling services to be prohibitive, and that acts as a brake on the energy modeling industry. Also, due to a lack of defined methods, practitioners follow a variety of processes in delivering energy-modeling services. 

Standardized processes and increased automation could potentially increase energy modeler productivity, with the added benefit of producing consistently higher quality models. 

“The energy modeling industry has a lot of room to mature in a variety of ways that can cut costs and improve the accuracy and quality of a model,” Majersik said. “Increased productivity would allow energy modelers to spend their time doing what they should do: focusing on design alternatives that optimize the building for efficiency.”