This report supplements our Boston Area Laboratory Energy Benchmarking Study, which analyzed energy consumption data for calendar year 2014 from a sample of 121 academic lab buildings in the Boston area.
In this new work, calendar year 2015 energy usage data were obtained for the same set of buildings. The goal of this exercise was two-fold: to uncover data quality issues which could manifest themselves as otherwise unexplained variations between years; and to determine whether the conclusions of the original study would hold over time.
The collection of a second year of data was ultimately a highly valuable exercise which resulted in a greater level of confidence in the integrity of the 2015 dataset.