From the US DOE Building Technologies Office

CBECS Data Collection Is Ending Soon

Data collection for the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) will be ending in mid-November. If any of your buildings have been sampled and contacted to participate, we urge you to respond as soon as possible. If you have received notification that your building was selected, please contact the survey contractor, Westat, at 888-528-3906 by November 13, 2013.

CBECS is conducted by the Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy every four years to collect information about the energy-related characteristics of commercial buildings in the U.S. and how much energy is used within them. The data are aggregated and published so that they can be used by building owners and managers for benchmarking, by energy modelers for forecasting, by product developers to gauge market potential, and by government to formulate policy. Additionally, CBECS data are used as the foundation for the Energy Star targets.

Buildings are statistically selected to represent up to a thousand other similar buildings. Once a building is sampled, it cannot be replaced with another building; therefore participation is critically important to the quality of the data. The data are collected under the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act of 2002, which ensures that buildings will never be identified; the data will be used exclusively for statistical purposes.