Investor Confidence Project Launches “Building Button” for Energy Efficiency

(SAN FRANCISCO, CA – December 15, 2016) Investor Confidence Project (ICP) today announced the launch of the “Building Button,” a new tool based on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Energy Data Exchange Specification that standardizes the collection of data from energy efficiency projects, and makes it easy to share that information with investors, building owners, developers, and utilities.

“One of the major barriers to wide-scale adoption of energy efficiency is the hassle factor. Every investment is unique, with data lodged in incompatible spreadsheets, documents, and other digital files,” said Matt Golden, ICP Director. “The lack of uniform data standards means that transaction costs are prohibitively high. The Building Button helps solve that by establishing guidelines for all project data, streamlining the process of project development and investment.”

The Building Button integrates best practices and specifications developed by ICP and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), including the Building Energy Data Exchange Specification (BEDES), into a dictionary of terms and definitions that expresses energy efficiency data in a common language. This allows all parties to compare specifications across multiple projects with a single click, reducing underwriting and actuarial analysis costs, building trust in energy savings, and driving market demand for energy efficiency projects. Combining the Building Button with ICP’s commercial and multifamily building protocols gives investors and building owners confidence in energy savings backed by empirical, project-level data across multiple projects.

“With millions of buildings around the world in need of upgrades, the Building Button is a great complement to the Investor Confidence Project because it helps reduce uncertainty in a project’s environmental and financial performance,” said Victor Rojas, Senior Manager, Clean Energy Finance at Environmental Defense Fund. “Standardization drives finance — and, alongside the ICP system, the Building Button will help make standardized data more accessible to the market.”

ICP and its Investor Ready Energy Efficiency^TM (IREE) certification standardize the way efficiency projects are developed and brought to market by incorporating industry best practices to ensure performance, as well as measurement and verification. The ICP system makes energy efficiency upgrade projects more attractive to investors and building owners alike by providing tools to assess risk more accurately, and build trust in energy savings performance and return on investment. ICP investor-ready projects and pilots are at the forefront of a growing trend toward “pay for performance” (P4P) programs in five U.S. states and in the UK. 

In 2017, ICP will join Green Building Certification Inc. (GBCI) to create the first global underwriting standard for energy efficiency projects.

For more information on the Investor Confidence Project, visit www.eeperformance.org.