By regularly monitoring and reporting on your energy use, you can make sure your building is operating as expected, get status updates to inform decision making, and track progress towards your project goals, including quantifying energy and cost savings.

Successful building renewal projects are centered on continual measurement to ensure that the investment delivers ongoing value to building owners, tenants, and investors. In addition to benchmarking your energy use benchmarking your energy use, the most effective measurement and verification (M&V) strategies continually track a host of additional factors, including:

• Net operating income
• Avoided future risk
• Tenant attraction and retention
• Environmental and social governance (ESG) reporting targets

Measuring and ensuring the achievement of anticipated results makes it easier to capitalize on and communicate the benefits of building renewal investments. Moreover, a thorough M&V process is the best way to assess savings against performance targets and monitor savings persistence. In some jurisdictions, regular M&V reporting is required, unless building performance standards are met.

By using accepted M&V techniques, owners, managers, and investors can quantify that performance targets are being met and document a history of accomplishments to use in future projects. Even beyond documenting energy performance over time, benchmarking and M&V results can fulfill a variety of building objectives, including:

• Providing a loan for systems or investments
• Driving service provider accountability
• Knowing when to reprogram controls or system parameters
• Documenting compliance for building performance standards