If you are interested in the energy performance of buildings, you now have an easy place to turn to: the Buildings Performance Database.

Launched this week by the U.S. Department of Energy, it makes information on 60,000 residential and commercial buildings free to the public.

It enables people to perform statistical analysis on an anonymous dataset of tens of thousands of commercial and residential buildings from across the country.

Users can compare performance trends among similar buildings to identify and prioritize cost-saving energy efficiency improvements and assess the range of likely savings from these improvements.

In addition to where the building is located, you'll find its age, size, function, electricity and fuel consumption, equipment information and operational characteristics.

Commercial and residential buildings consume roughly 70 percent of U.S. electricity production consumption in the nation.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Building Energy Inc. developed the database.

Perhaps some of the data comes from the eight cities that now require building owners to disclose their energy (and sometimes water) use each year: Boston; New York City; San Francisco; Seattle; Minneapolis; Austin, Texas; Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. They also require disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions.

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