BUILDING PERFORMANCE | DATA MAKING DATA COUNT Standardising energy data is essential to accurately assess relative building performance. Julie Godefroy compares data from previous CIBSE award winners with the latest energy use targets and introduces a new awards submission form that aims to maximise the value of data S We are looking to maximise the value gained from the awards data for applicants and industry ince their creation in 2012, the CIBSE Building Performance Awards have been based on monitored energy use data. With contractual and regulatory performance rising up the agenda, CIBSE has been looking at the past six years of entries to see what we can learn from building performance and data collection. There has been an increasing number of resources and research on building performance data including CIBSEs TM61-64 suite on Operational performance,1 the RIBA Plan for Use Guide 2021,2 and a new book on the lessons to be learnt from post-occupancy evaluations (see Book review: Energy, people and buildings on page 15.) We are looking to maximise the value gained from the awards data for applicants and industry and to identify whether projects could contribute to the CIBSE benchmarks database,3 especially at the low energy end of the scale. Ideally, we would like to showcase the projects on the platform (subject to agreement by applicants). As well as making use of the data for the good of the industry, we would like to make the awards process simpler for applicants and are proposing a new data colletion form for those entering.4 For the moment, the exercise has focused on UK buildings and we have found 85 projects with good-quality data suitable for analysis. It could be expanded to other countries or regions. What the review has told us about building performance The Enterprise Centre One of the aims of the data review was to identify best-performing CIBSE award submissions from 2016 to 2021 projects and compare them with industry targets from the RIBA 2030 Challenge5 target and LETIs Net Zero Operational Carbon6 paper. The results are summarised as follows. The energy use intensity (EUI) targets include all energy used by the building, from the grid and on-site supplies, normalised to floor area. Housing CIBSE award submissions LETI EUI target: 35kWhm-2 GIA per year RIBA 2030 target: 35kWhm-2 per year. Three individual homes met the LETI EUI (or almost, at 37 or 38kWhm-2 per year). They included 2019 winner Lark Rise (it did have a wood burner fitted, but according to the architect has hardly been used). All have Passivhaus certification and a heat pump also the design strategy modelled when creating the LETI EUI. While energy use is undeniably low, they are also relatively large dwellings (above 150m2 GIA), which can make energy use benchmarked per m2 look better than it would per dwelling or per occupant. The 2020 award winner, Agar Grove, scheme, is also Passivhaus certified and achieved exemplar electricity consumption and space heating demand, which is remarkable as it has much more average dwelling sizes. However, it is served by block heating (gas boiler fed), which takes it well 16 May 2021 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE May 21 pp16-18 Performance data.indd 16 23/04/2021 15:52