Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LLC (JCI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining today's webinar and introduction to the Building Efficiency Targeting Tool for Energy Retrofits, also known as BETTER. My name is [ Tyler Grub ], and I'm just going to briefly introduce our panel speakers this afternoon and also describe how you can share your questions with us before we get started. So today, we're going to have, first, Carolyn Szum and Han Li both of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Carolyn is a program manager in the Energy Analysis and Environmental Impact Division of the Energy Technologies Area at LBNL, and Han is a Scientific Engineering Associate in the Building Technology Urban Systems Division also the Energy Technologies Area at LBNL. Clay Nesler is the Vice President of Global Energy and Regulatory Affairs with Johnson Controls, and he's also the Interim President of the Alliance to Save Energy. Eric Noller is principally the Founder of Energy Resources Integration. Eric Mackres is the Data and Tools Manager for Urban Efficiency and Climate Data at the World Resources Institute Ross Center for Sustainable Cities; and Cliff Majersik is the Director of Market Transformation for the Institute for Market Transformation, IMT. So those are all the speakers that we are glad to be able to present to you today. And just a quick note, we encourage all attendees to share questions or comments at any time. Attendees are muted by default when they join the webinar. However, if you share your questions or comments via the questions tab on your Go to Webinar interface, they will come through to us and then we will direct them to speakers during the final 15 minutes of today's webinar which will be dedicated exclusively to Q&A. So with that out of the way, I'm glad to turn things over to Carolyn Szum to begin today's presentation. Carol?

Thanks, [ Tyler ]. Next slide, please. So thank you all for joining today's webinar to introduce the Building Efficiency Targeting Tool for Energy Retrofits. Today's agenda, we'll do a short introduction to the tool, talking about its objective, history, our industry partnership, features, use cases and potential future enhancements. We'll then hear from our pilot partner, Energy Resources Integration, Institute for Market Transformation and the World Resources Institute to discuss early stage application of BETTER. We'll close with a discussion on opportunities to leverage BETTER to support U.S. economic recovery amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a live demonstration and then open it up to questions. Next slide. Before we get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge Johnson Controls, who provided valuable intellectual property under a cooperative research and development agreement with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Berkeley Lab and Johnson Controls co-developed BETTER under this credo with support from ICF International. Next slide. Next slide. So as building professionals, we're well aware of the challenges that we face in terms of improving U.S. commercial building, energy performance at speed and scale. The U.S. Department of Energy Building Technologies Office has set forth ambitious long-term goals to reduce energy usage per square foot for U.S. buildings by 50% compared to 2010 levels. Moreover, more than 60% of U.S. commercial floor space will have been built before 2014 by 2030, and thus be in need of a retrofit. Added to this, less than half of U.S. electricity customers have advanced metering infrastructure in place and rely on monthly energy data. Thus, to achieve these ambitious targets, any strategy you would need to take into account both large-scale retrofit as well as the availability of monthly energy data. Traditionally, selecting buildings for retrofits or energy performance improvement involve complex and time-intensive processes such as use of simulation models that need to be carefully defined and calibrated and/or conducting on-site audits where upfront effort and costs can be prohibitive to many building owners. That's within this context. Next slide, please. Johnson Controls and LBNL partnered to introduce an easy-to-use, open source tool to target efficiency improvements by turning readily available building information and monthly energy data into specific energy efficiency interventions, both operational and technological for both the building and portfolio level. Importantly, this web-based application, BETTER, doesn't replace an audit, but it does provide a preliminary estimate of the size and makeup of potential energy efficiency projects. The tool is designed to be highly scalable and used to target efficiency opportunities in either one building or many buildings simultaneously. BETTER is not a rating tool and does not provide a score or a passive certification, and it's also designed to complement and interact with DoE's existing tools, energy to our portfolio manager, the Asset Score of building sync and the standard energy efficiency data platform. Next slide. I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Clay, to talk a little bit about the history and evolution of BETTER and why Johnson Controls partnered with the Lab to introduce BETTER into the marketplace.

Thank you, Carolyn, and welcome, everyone, joining our webinar today. Johnson Controls involvement with the BETTER tool goes back almost 8 years, where in a research group, we were looking for ways of estimating the impact of various faults in building energy systems. We came upon some research by Professor Kelly Kissock from the University of Dayton, which used inverse models that are used to model the energy use of buildings both heating, cooling and baseload, and we were using that to evaluate and estimate the magnitude of various faults, and then the lightbulb went on. And we said, "Wouldn't this make a very interesting tool to be able to do an assessment of an existing building and benchmark the coefficients of those inverse models?" That was the idea that sparked the LEAN Analysis Tool, which Johnson Controls developed and used to evaluate energy efficiency potentials in over 700 buildings. The tool, as we had developed it, was very effective but also required manual intervention to tweak the model parameters and choose appropriate ranges of energy use data in order to come up with good estimates. What we really needed was a tool that was as accurate as LEAN Analysis but fully automated so that, that capability would be available to anyone, not just experienced energy engineers. That's when we entered into a CRADA with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to take our existing intellectual property and develop a tool, which is now being released in the public domain. Back to Carolyn for the details of the tool.

Thanks, Clay. So the partnership with industry, as you just heard, is an essential voltage development as well as the verification and piloting of BETTER. Global industries contributed cost shareable cash and in kind of more than $2 million for BETTER's development. Moreover, 12 organizations have agreed to share energy data to support development, verification and piloting of BETTER, amounting to approximately 1,500 buildings to date. And you can see our data providers, ESCO, school district, market transformation programs there on the bottom of the slide. Next slide, please. So I'm going to talk a little bit at a high level about BETTER features, and then we'll talk about the data inputs, the analytical methodology and output of BETTER. So the BETTER web app was first released in alpha version on Earth Day 2019. BETTER is copyrighted, web-based efficiency targeting tool for energy retrofits. It can be accessed at the URL on the upper left. The analytical engine is open-sourced, and the code is available on GitHub for download, redevelopment, redistribution under the terms of an open-source software license. BETTER was designed to be applicable to buildings that have heating and cooling equipment and where energy usage is sensitive to weather conditions anywhere in the world. BETTER runs on readily available monthly energy usage data, plus building size, location and type. The tool automatically regresses monthly electricity and thoughtful fuel usage versus ambient temperatures. You can see the change point model for electricity in the lower right there. Next slide. Isolate those inverse model coefficients and benchmarks them against an underlying data set. Through that benchmarking process, BETTER quantifies energy and cost savings potential at both the building and portfolio level and recommends measurable action-oriented energy efficiency interventions, both operational and technological, for buildings and portfolios. BETTER also provides users with flexible savings targets, offering them several options to improve energy efficiency at the building and portfolio level. They can seek to achieve aggressive energy savings, nominal or more conservative energy savings if they're just getting started. Next slide. Our beta BETTER tool was released on July 9, 2020. This version of the tool, which we're going to talk about today and do a live demonstration on, includes a number of enhancements, including ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager data upload. Users of ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager can now auto-generate Excel-based reports within Portfolio Manager that contain all the data necessary to be analyzed by BETTER. BETTER can automatically upload and evaluate these buildings and then recommend energy efficiency improvements to achieve higher levels of energy performance as measured by the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager tool. The tool also incorporates a shorter run time due to unique parallel inverse model fitting process for a large portfolio. We've incorporated estimated GHG emissions intensity and reduction potential, and this is to support compliance of -- for buildings in New York City that are under the Local Law 97, which sets limits on carbon emissions per square foot of buildings. We also incorporate a built-in reference benchmark statistics for U.S. offices, and we're working toward benchmark statistics and underlying datasets for other space types such as K-12 schools, hotels, hospitals, laboratories and universities. Under development is a RESTful Application Program Interface, which would allow software developers to exchange data with BETTER and receive our metrics and incorporate those into existing platforms and tools. Next slide. As I mentioned earlier, BETTER is designed to complement existing Department of Energy tools such as ENERGY STAR and the Asset Score. As depicted here, you can see along the x-axis building energy assets for ratings, where score of 10 indicates top physical characteristics within a building. Along the y-axis is our ENERGY STAR rating, scores from 1 to 100, where 100 is an indicator of top operating energy performance in building. BETTER is really most appropriate for buildings within the lower right quadrant. These are buildings that have good physical characteristics but core operational energy performance, and they want to improve operational energy performance, increase our ENERGY STAR scores and realize some of those operating cost savings. BETTER recommends both technology and operational improvements to improve buildings operating energy performance. Next slide. In terms of a quick depiction of the overall analytical methodology and the workflow of BETTER, I'm going to talk about this in brief, and then we'll go into more detail on the data requirements and the output. Building takes basic building data, such as size, location and type, combines this with weather data from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration database, plus basic utility bill information, monthly consumption and cost. Data preprocesses this data and applies the ASHRAE Inverse Modeling Toolkit to create inverse or change point models. You can see that inverse model in this upper center portion of this graph. Essentially, what we're doing here is we're recording the building's energy use intensity against changes in outdoor air temperature. The inverse model will allow us to derive 5 coefficients of performance. The horizontal line segment represents the baseload for building's energy consumption. This is the weather-independent energy consumption. And it's typically driven by a combination of the efficiency of the lighting, the plug loads and the process loads in the building. This coefficients, the cooling and heating sensitive consumption, are functions of the building's envelope, ventilation and filtration air and the efficiency of the heating and cooling system. The heating and cooling change points, which you can see or the breakeven temperatures, are a function of the temperature step points in the building or the internal heat load in the building. So essentially, what we're doing is creating this inverse model and then we're isolating these coefficients. We take those coefficients and we benchmark them against either a built-in reference dataset developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab or a user defined data set. We're essentially taking each coefficient baseload, for example, comparing it to the median and the standard deviation for that underlying dataset. When a specific building's coefficient is better than one standard deviation from the median, we consider that to be good performance. Worse than one standard deviation is considered poor, and everything in between is typical. Taking that information, we take a user-defined retrofit target level, whether aggressive savings are thought to be achieved nominal or conservative. Combining that, Building Efficiency Targeting for Energy Retrofit leverages that Johnson Controls' intellectual property and identify specific energy efficiency improvement measures and quantifies energy and cost savings potential for building. We then generate output reports, which provide valuable information for building operators, telling not only the cost savings potential, but also how to go about capturing that cost savings potential to building a portfolio level. Next slide, please. So key data inputs. As mentioned earlier, we try to keep the data input as minimal as possible so we can have the most users possible. So we usually will be asked to provide the unit system in which they want to work. If they're international, they'll use standard international units. If they're here in the U.S., they'll likely go in imperial units. A building identification number, the building name, the location, in the U.S., that would be city and state or postal code internationally. We'd also asked for country information. The gross floor area, excluding parking, primary building space type, all of the space types that can currently use BETTER can also be -- are used by the portfolio manager tool to benchmark. So we keep our space types consistent with portfolio manager as well as currency information, which allows us to understand how we should report financial savings back to the BETTER user. Next slide, please. In addition to that building data, we also require basic utility bill input, a minimum of 12 consecutive months of energy usage data for all fuels in the building, including the monthly billing start date, end date, energy type, units and monthly energy usage. Cost is optional. BETTER does allow for default energy cost data to be retrieved and utilized and estimating cost savings for buildings in the United States that use electricity, natural gas, propane, kerosene, fuel oils, coal and diesel. In addition, as I mentioned earlier, BETTER is accessing weather data from NOAA, from 97 weather stations globally as far back as 2010. If, for some reason, NOAA data is not accessible for a given location or billing period, BETTER will prompt a user to enter average outdoor air temperature. So that's also an optional input. Next slide, please. So with that information, BETTER will generate, first and foremost, a single building summary report. So for any building of benchmarks using BETTER, the following information will be provided. Here, you can see the building's potential cost savings through energy performance improvement, both a percentage and a dollar value as well as the energy savings. We break that down into electricity, energy and cost savings and fossil fuel energy and cost savings as well as the GHG emissions reduction potential on an aggregate level and the intensity reduction level that can be achieved, again, to support compliance with emerging laws such as New York City of Local Law 97. Next slide, please. In addition for a single building, a user is going to receive energy efficiency recommendation specific to this building. You can see those depicted on the upper right corner by pressing the details button, which we'll do a little later when we go to the live demo, a user is directed to more specific step-wise guidance on how to implement these recommendations as well as resources where they can look for more advanced information about procuring services, et cetera. In addition to the savings breakdown -- in addition to the EE recommendations, the tool also provides a breakdown of cost and cost savings at an individual building level. A user is shown their own building cooling baseload and heating energy costs as compared to a typical building and the goal building or the target building as well as the cost savings breakdown. In other words, if they were to implement these EE measures and achieve that energy and cost savings potential, most of the cost savings in this building are going to come from reduction in heating costs and baseload costs. Finally, the graphs in the lower portion of this slide, energy consumption trends allow user to understand a current energy consumption on a monthly basis for both electric and fossil fuel in the building, and the green line shows how that building would be consuming energy on a monthly basis if it were to implement the energy efficiency recommendation. Next slide. Finally, in a single building analysis, a user will be shown the inverse models from which we derive both the energy and cost savings potential and the energy efficiency recommendations. You can see on the left side, our change point models; and on the right side, those coefficients having been isolated and benchmarked and how they compare to other similar buildings with a rating of good, poor, typical, et cetera. And my colleague is going to show a little more about this in the live demo. Next slide. Next, portfolio analysis. So for building -- excuse me -- for operators that have multiple buildings, perhaps a large corporate portfolio or a municipal portfolio and want to analyze and compare buildings one to another within that portfolio, BETTER offers portfolio summary report. We provide cost savings for the entire portfolio as well as energy savings, both a dollar value and a percentage, again, the breakdown against electricity and fossil and the GHG emissions reduction potential. Next slide. We also show more detailed information about consumption, intensity levels, percentage savings, et cetera, for energy, GHG and cost at the portfolio level. Next slide. And again, the top energy efficiency recommendations for our portfolio. So in this case, we've identified 5 recommendations shown in blue, and BETTER will indicate which buildings in the portfolio and how many buildings in the portfolio need to implement that energy efficiency opportunity. And this lends itself to improving energy performance at scale and speed as well as identifying opportunities for bulk purchase of equipment or systems, discounts, financing, et cetera. Next slide. Finally, the portfolio, energy consumption and savings summary, which just gives a user a quick snapshot of their comparative energy performance across their portfolio. So the blue bars indicate annual electricity usage intensity, kWh per square meter or kBtu per square foot; fossil fuel intensity in the red; as well as savings potential in the green. My colleague, Han, is going to show us how we can be and interact with this traffic a little bit more in the live demo. To pinpoint those buildings that we should go after for audit and retro commissioning, site assessments, those that we might be able to glean lessons learned from because they're a top performer. There's not a lot of savings potential. And some of those billings are midrange that offer themselves to O&M tune-up. Next slide. So BETTER pilot -- BETTER has been used by -- BETTER pilot projects are happening in more than 31 countries currently. You can see in the deep blue locations with deep dive, BETTER pilot projects, light, newer locations where we've got fully trained users. Next slide. And here's just a quick depiction of who is using BETTER and for what. We've got public sector users as well as private sector users, energy service providers, real estate investors, energy efficiency market transformation programs, states and cities, school districts and organizations involved in workforce development. I'm going to just mention a couple that I think are unique and important. ENERGY GENERAL LLC is a small consulting firm in Connecticut, which is using BETTER to target buildings for retrofits and under-serviced communities at scale, thereby supporting environmental justice and energy justice. Also, Florida Gulf Coast University is incorporating BETTER into its sustainability focused, environmental and civil engineering curriculum, providing basic training for the next-generation of field-based comprehensive energy workers. Principally, in county public schools have also been an early adopter of BETTER, and they've used the tool to identify more than $1 million of energy cost savings in their school district through energy efficiency improvement. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues at -- oh, sorry, one more slide here, potential future enhancements. BETTER is under development. We're in a beta phase. Moving toward launch in mid-2021. We've gone through the pilot process. We've gotten a lot of feedback from early-stage users as to ways we can prove better, including enhanced interoperability with DoE and private sector tools, account and data storage for users, enhanced energy efficiency recommendations and more step-wise guidance to implement those recommendations, ways to handle smart meter or interval data, enhanced recording functions and increasing the built-in reference statistics for space types in the U.S. Next slide. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to my colleague, Eric Noller, at Energy Resources Integration to talk a little bit about how his organization has been using BETTER. Next slide.

Thank you, Carolyn. So as Carolyn mentioned, I'm going to talk about how we're using BETTER with the Judicial Council of California to help work toward the state of California's energy reduction goals. So Energy Resources Integration or ERI is an energy engineering consulting company headquartered in San Francisco and focused on energy efficiency. We provide energy analytics, modeling, energy audits and sustainability planning services. And the JCC is the Judicial Council of California. They have over 450 buildings throughout the state, including courthouses and administrative offices. And Executive Order B-18-12, which was executed by Governor [ Jerry Brown ] in 2012 has driven a lot of the JCC's efforts over the past 8 years looking at greenhouse gas emissions reduction, 0 net energy construction, on-site generation and demand response. And so ERI has worked with JCC for nearly a decade now. The relationship started with some education on the loading order and utility incentive programs. This led to some -- performing some energy usage intensity analysis for their courthouse facilities. We wanted to find out which buildings were the largest consumers and the least efficient. So we've performed, as a result, numerous audits and retro commissioning studies for these buildings as well as providing implementation planning. These buildings enhanced by technology, geography, financial impacts to help with quickly planning and achieving energy savings. Next slide, please. Now I'd like to get into how exactly we're using the BETTER tool in our work with the Judicial Council. One of the key objectives when developing our approach to improving the efficiency of these buildings is comparing them against each other. Since we have a large portfolio to work with and most of the buildings are similar in function and end use, we have a good basis for performing benchmarking, and this is where the BETTER tool has been extremely valuable. So as you can see from the top figures, we're able to compare multiple facilities with each other to see how they stack up relative to each other. We can see the energy use intensity for electric and gas, respectively in these bars that are blue and red; and then in green, the projected energy savings per building. Now if we want to look into further detail for a particular building, we run the tool for that building and see more details relative to change point analyses and potential measures that can apply to the building, and that's indicated in that lower figure there. Next slide, please. So as we dive into analyzing these buildings, we're working with JCC and their utility programs to target buildings for technical analysis such as retro commissioning studies, performing those detailed analyses and determining the utility program incentive to that. And some of the key criteria we use for determining the prime candidates for further study include demand, so we're looking heavily at those buildings that are over 300 KW; energy usage intensity, of course; so kind of one level is like over 50 kBtu per square foot, focusing on those buildings first; and then savings potential, so first, looking at the buildings that have over 25% savings potential or more. And then what we found using the BETTER -- some huge savings potential across the entire portfolio amounting to over $5.6 million in electric cost savings and natural gas savings of over $800,000 potentially. And some common measures we are seeing in the BETTER tool across these courthouse facilities include scheduling optimization, economizer repair, set point adjustments and reduction of lighting roads. And these have been confirmed through a lot of the preliminary on-site investigations and energy audits that we've done. We are confirming these that the BETTER tool has identified these, and we're seeing these in person as well at these locations. So it's good indications. Next slide, please. So this demonstrates a case study for one of the buildings we have analyzed through BETTER, and we've selected this particular one for further retro commissioning investigation. It is a 341,000 square foot building, a courthouse, consisting of end-use spaces, typical for a courthouse. So it includes office space, courtrooms, jury rating rooms, chambers, document storage rooms. And for this facility, the BETTER tool identified some -- sorry, potential savings of over $74,000, as you see there, some of the figures of the BETTER tool outputs are shown. One thing in particular that jumps out we see here is the low cooling change point that's shown in the lower right toward the middle of the slide, the electricity change point model. And we noticed that this facility is in cooling mode across a larger range of outside air temperatures than would be typical for a building like this. So this tells us that too much energy is being used for cooling, and further investigation is warranted. And so in this case, we have access to not only monthly data, but 15-minute interval data as well. So we've used this interval data to perform a deeper dive into the energy consumption of this particular building. And so on the right side of the slide, you'll see the ERI energy heat map tool, which shows the visual representation of the energy consumption of the building across the hours of the day going across the horizontal axis and throughout each day of the year on the vertical axis. And one example we found with using [ BETTER ] for this building on the right side of the figure, we see some unusual energy consumption between hours of 9 to 11 pm. So you see the yellow and red during that [ circle ], and we would normally expect that to be green, indicating low energy usage during those night time hours. But this is something that we would look for on site, and we're planning to start our retro commissioning study soon on a site visit for this building and analyze that further. So just summing, one key example of how this is being used, very powerful tool, and we're excited to be a part of testing it out. Next slide or next presenter.

Thanks, Eric. And I now turn it over to Cliff Majersik of Institute for Market Transformation to talk a little bit about his organization and early application of BETTER.

Thank you, Carolyn, and thank you all for having me. So the Institute for Market Transformation, IMT, is an organization, a nonprofit, based in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to catalyze widespread and sustained demand for high-performing buildings, in support of our vision, which is a world in which buildings are efficiently and positively transforming our physical, social and economic well-being. So we are very much about buildings but buildings as a means towards the end of benefiting people. Next slide, please. And we do that by working with a variety of stakeholders. We work with building owners, with service providers, with banks, appraisers and brokers, community stakeholders, the community itself and government agencies that represent them. And we help companies put in place best practices through research and best practice sharing, convening. But we help governments design policies, and we help governments work with their stakeholders to make sure that those policies represents what their community really values and will not produce unintended consequences. So we try to leverage our understanding of buildings in the real estate market to make sure that we get outcomes that work for everybody and that companies can cross for under those policies. Next slide. So the good news for us in terms of driving demand for high-performing buildings is that there's a very good story to tell there. Generally, investing in high-performance buildings is a very good investment. You can see some stats, and there are many more that we regularly share. ENERGY STAR and lead buildings both have a number of studies. They all find that they have premium occupancy rates, premium rents and premium sales prices. These are for commercial buildings. The dynamic here is a high-performing company wants to be in a high-performing building, and they're willing to pay a premium for it. We found that energy efficiency retrofits typically yield $2 to $3 of property value increase for every $1 invested. And these are studies from across portfolios, multiple portfolios and also from -- within a single portfolio. And these light two stats that green high-performing buildings have lower operating expenses and higher net operating income on a per square foot basis when compared to non-green buildings. That comes from an in-depth analysis, looking at a large national portfolio owner. So a really good story to tell that these high-performing buildings are good investments. And next slide. And so with that in mind, a number of jurisdictions have put in place policies to drive investment in high-performing buildings, and this is a map showing building performance policies around the country. The most common building performance policy is a benchmarking and transparency law, and all of the benchmarking and transparency laws in the United States rely on the EPA ENERGY STAR tool for benchmarking. So that produces a 1 to 100 score for many building types. So every dot here is a jurisdiction that has a benchmarking and transparency law, and the purple dots are jurisdictions that have gone beyond simply requiring benchmarking and transparency. They also require either audits or retro commissioning. One of the most ambitious policies now, the newest policies passed in the last 18 months are building performance standards. And Carolyn referenced Local Law 97 in New York, which is one of those building performance standards. The other building performance standards are in Washington, D.C., Washington state and St. Louis. And these policies actually require that buildings either meet a minimum level of performance, and that performance can be measured in energy or carbon or that they make substantial, tangible improvements to that performance. And so the BETTER tool is a terrific tool to help get building owners started towards meeting those requirements of these building performance standards. It can work very well in conjunction with benchmarking and transparency laws since it has the interfaces with the ENERGY STAR tool. We know, for instance, that Washington, D.C. is looking at using BETTER as a complement to the benchmarking and transparency law that they have and using it to provide additional data to building owners to help them get started in improving their building performance. The whole point of these benchmarking and transparency laws is that you can't manage what you don't measure. We want building owners to know how their buildings compare with their peers. We want tenants and investors to know, and we want that to drive a virtuous cycle of competition to attract and retain the best tenants and the best investors on the part of building owners, and so BETTER can feed into all of that to help building owners improve their building performance and prosper in this more transparent environment and prosper and comply with these building performance standards. It also can work very well in association with audit and retro commissioning requirements. Next slide, please. So we also run the high-performance building hub for Washington, D.C. This is funded by the district government, the government of the District of Columbia. And the mission of this building hub, which is just in the process of launching over the next few months, is to help building owners improve the performance of their buildings so that they can build, operate, retrofit their buildings to be better, to be higher-performing buildings in terms of energy and carbon and also health and resilience and other factors. Now part of the mission of this hub is to help building owners comply with the building performance standard that was adopted in late 2018 in Washington, D.C. And one of the biggest challenges in doing so is just helping building owners get started. They don't really know what resources are available. They don't have a good sense of how their buildings are performing or what problems their buildings may have, and the BETTER tool is a great tool to get them started, to get them leap headed in the right direction, figuring out what buildings they should focus on first, where they should be getting full audits to figure out how to improve the performance of those buildings. So the hub is looking to use the tool as a way to motivate building owners to get started, to help them get started, and to help bring multiple stakeholders together to improve the performance of the buildings. Next slide, and I'll hand it off.

Thank you so much, Cliff. Now over to Eric Mackres from the World Resources Institute.

Thanks, Carolyn, and everyone. Hello. So I'm going to zoom out to look at the global scale and to give some examples from the use of BETTER in the building efficiency accelerator network. So this is a global initiative supporting cities and subnational governments to make commitments to acting on building energy efficiency and sustainable buildings and to help them implement policies and programs to achieve their goals related to urban development and how cities can contribute to them. So right now it consists of 55 partners in 25 partner cities and other international governments in 25 countries. And we have specific focus on 3 of those countries right now in Mexico, Colombia and India. Next slide, please. So the way that the building efficiency accelerated in the BEA works is we have the network of subnational governments, partners to the BEA and a network of businesses, technical organizations and assistance providers. So here's some of those here. My organization, the World Resources Institute, coordinates the efforts, and part of our work is marrying the needs of cities with the capacity and expertise of these technical partners. Next, please. So the BEA provides at least 4 different kinds of assistance to the cities from prioritizing and tracking -- prioritizing action and tracking progress, financing and funding connections and international recognition and collaboration. Our work with BETTER really fits into this fourth category and the second one listed here of tools, expertise and solutions helping to provide technical resources that will drive action within new cities. Next, please. And we provide technical assistance in a variety of different ways from a late touch in terms of playbooks, which are resource guides and process guides for actions in different areas, all the way down to deep engagement where we have several cities where we have funded technical staff to work over a year-plus time period in several cities to drive particular actions on building efficiency. So BETTER has been a critical resource for us on -- in 2 of the 3 focus topics where we provide assistance in building retrofits and also building efficiency targets. The BETTER team has provided pure learning opportunities and some direct technical assistance on how to use BETTER and how that can inform the actions in these cities. Next, please. And here's just a little bit about some of the places that have used BETTER and some of the things that we've learned so far. Mexico City and Sonora, Mexico have recently launched building challenges similar to the Better Buildings initiative, the Better Buildings Challenge in the United States. And so they're recommending BETTER as a tool that some of their participant partners in the private sector and the public sector can use for tracking their commitments and prioritizing their actions. Our partner study in Turkey has assessed 3 public buildings and has now moved on to an investment-grade audit for one of them that was initially assessed using BETTER. In Nagpur, India, they're collecting data on both public buildings and hotels to be able to better understand the opportunities in those sectors and to guide policy development. Colombia, there's 2 cities that are beginning the process of collecting and assessing data both in schools and public buildings. In Costa Rica and South Africa, several of our participant cities are thinking about campaigns and exploring the potential to use BETTER. So what we've learned so far from the use of BETTER in these jurisdictions is that -- I mean in general, things look very different around the world, but things that carry across is that the relatively low data needs and costs of BETTER and then the relatively high insights that can come with it is quite valuable. There's still the data collection needs, which takes some time, but it's much less than a lot of the other methods, and the costs are much lower. There's excitement about the ability to use the kind of rapid measure and building prioritization methods. But interestingly enough, particularly in climates with low heating and cooling loads or in economic context, where there's limited heating and cooling in buildings, mechanized heating and cooling buildings, the value was less. As you noted, the heating and cooling elements is really important in the value of BETTER. There's some desire for some additional features thinking about how we can provide additional opportunity to customize the defaults that exist related to weather data, if there's more localized weather data, which is not nearly as universally available through the existing BETTER database elsewhere in the world compared in the U.S. And finally, I think really another important element is the existing benchmarking database that is available for the United States, doesn't exist elsewhere in the world. So the kind of benchmarking capability of comparing building the success in BETTER to what a typical building in that context in these other countries does not exist right now, and so there's a desire to think about how to build additional national or regional benchmarking databases to unlock additional value from BETTER that needs additional contexts. That's just a little bit about the BEA use of BETTER, and I'll hand it back.

Thank you so much, Eric. Now back to Clay Nesler to talk about opportunities to leverage BETTER to support U.S. economic recovery amidst COVID-19.

Yes. Thanks, Carolyn, and thanks to the previous speakers. The case studies and the early use of the BETTER tool certainly shows its value in helping a variety of organizations whether in the U.S. or globally, whether private sector or public sector take advantage of this. Timing for BETTER couldn't be better in a way for all the wrong reasons. The COVID-19 pandemic has, of course, delta, a tremendous blow to the energy efficiency industry. At its peak, over 400,000 energy efficiency workers have been laid off and are unemployed. That's because energy auditors can't go into homes because of social distancing concerns. That's because construction projects have been halted. That's because of just general safety concerns, not only of the energy efficiency in place, but of the buildings in which they would work and the general economic issues of the recession. A tool like BETTER provides opportunity to using available historic data on energy used square footage of a building, the building's location to essentially take a first pass. Screen buildings for those with the greatest opportunity, identify upfront what those opportunities may be in the magnitude. Projects, particularly in commercial, industrial, institutional sectors can proceed with energy efficiency projects through the planning, project development and business case stage. That could get a lot of people back to work preparing for when everything is back to normal, whatever the new normal is, these projects can proceed. There's also the potential to use economic stimulus funding. The CARES Act provided funding to states, local governments, healthcare facilities to offset the cost of resetting and retrofitting to be safer and more healthy. So we don't know what the future will hold as it comes to stimulus funding, but it would sure be nice to have a backlog of shovel-ready projects ready to use that funding to not only improve the efficiency but also use the funding to improve the safety and the health within those buildings. So Carolyn, back to you.

Thank you, Clay. So we're going to do a very quick live demonstration of BETTER. So [ Tyler ], if you could shift over to Han, who will share his screen and walk through how to enter data and generate results.