Part 1: Utility Data Access and Building Performance
Why whole-building energy data is becoming essential to benchmarking and Building Performance Standards
Throughout 2026, one topic has kept resurfacing in our conversations with utilities, policymakers, implementers, and efficiency leaders: access to whole-building energy data.
The timing is not accidental.
Building performance policies continue to expand across the country. Sixteen active Building Performance Standard laws are now in place in the United States, alongside nearly 60 state and local benchmarking requirements. At the same time, many jurisdictions are moving from adoption to implementation and confronting the practical realities of making these policies work.
That growth is putting a brighter spotlight on a basic question: Can building owners actually get the energy data they need to meet these requirements?
At first glance, data access can sound like a technical issue involving portals, permissions, aggregation thresholds, or file formats. But the more the industry talks about benchmarking and BPS, the clearer it becomes that data access is not a side issue.
It is part of the foundation that determines whether building performance policies are practical to adopt and workable to implement.
Illinois offers one of the clearest recent examples. The state’s new Utility Data Access Act, which took effect June 1, 2026, establishes whole-building utility data access as a matter of public interest and creates a regulatory process for implementing standardized access to aggregated building energy data.
The law goes beyond treating data access as a narrow compliance tool. It connects better access with energy efficiency, customer engagement, building upgrades, peak load reduction, and broader economic benefits.
That is a meaningful shift. It reflects a growing recognition that utility data access should not be something the industry figures out after a benchmarking or BPS policy is already in place. It is infrastructure that can help make those policies work in the first place.
A conversation that keeps getting bigger
In June, at the 2026 NEEP Summit, Calico Energy’s Colleen Morris facilitated an audience-guided panel centered on a deceptively simple question: How can utility data access programs better support Building Performance Standards implementation?
The discussion quickly moved beyond the mechanics of delivering energy data.
Panelists and attendees explored how utilities can support whole-building reporting, how data access affects the burden placed on building owners, how utilities and local governments can coordinate more effectively, and how emerging attribution approaches may allow utilities to receive credit for savings that result from policy-driven market transformation.
These questions are increasingly connected.
If a city adopts a benchmarking ordinance, building owners need complete energy use data to comply. If that jurisdiction later moves to a BPS, those same owners need reliable data not only to report performance, but also to track progress toward reduction targets.
Much of that information sits with electric and gas utilities, often across many tenant-held accounts. That means a utility’s approach to data access can meaningfully shape how difficult a building performance policy is to implement in practice.
When data access is treated as an afterthought, everyone downstream feels the friction. Owners spend more time assembling data. Municipal staff spend more time troubleshooting. Utilities receive more manual requests. And already complex policies become harder to administer.
By contrast, when data access is designed as part of the building performance ecosystem, it can reduce friction for everyone involved.
From industry conversation to national research
That conversation carried directly into the ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings this August, where Colleen joined Katie Kaluzny of Illinois Green Alliance, Rick Tonielli of ComEd, and Dan Streit and Jeannette LeZaks of Slipstream to present Connecting the Dots: How Utility Data Access Enables Building Performance Success.
The paper gave us an opportunity to test many of the themes surfacing in industry conversations against national data and stakeholder experience.
The research examined utility data access offerings, benchmarking and BPS adoption patterns, and interviews with policy implementers. Its core premise is straightforward: benchmarking and BPS depend on complete, accurate, and accessible whole-building energy data, yet the way utilities provide that data varies significantly.
One of the most interesting findings was the relationship between stronger data access and policy adoption.
Across the 30 largest U.S. metropolitan areas studied, benchmarking policies were more prevalent in areas served by utilities with higher levels of whole-building data access. The share of the population living in a benchmarking jurisdiction was 4.7 percent in areas categorized as having low data access, compared with 19.6 percent in areas with high access.
That does not prove that better data access causes policy adoption. But it does reinforce a pattern practitioners have described for years: jurisdictions are more likely to view building performance policies as workable when owners have a practical way to obtain the data those policies require.
The pattern becomes even more striking with BPS. In the study, all 11 local jurisdictions that had progressed from benchmarking to a BPS were served by utilities providing aggregated whole-building data for both commercial and multifamily properties through a web service.
Data access is not the only factor in whether a jurisdiction advances to a performance standard, but it appears to be an important enabling condition.
What we are hearing from the field
Some of the most useful insights in the ACEEE work came from practitioners directly involved in policy adoption and implementation.
In several jurisdictions, access to aggregated utility data helped address concerns about asking building owners to collect information tenant by tenant. In others, utility coordination happened alongside ordinance development, so a workable data process would be in place when requirements took effect.
Denver offers a clear example. As Sharon Jaye put it, without access to aggregated whole-building data, Denver “would not be able to implement an energy efficiency standard at all.”
The paper also points to Chicago, where a former policymaker described tenant-by-tenant data collection as “logistically and politically impossible” for covered buildings.
Together, those examples underscore a larger point: data access is not simply a convenience layered onto BPS implementation. In some jurisdictions, it is a prerequisite for making the policy workable.
Data access belongs at the beginning
The national growth of benchmarking and BPS makes these conversations increasingly urgent.
The industry is no longer talking only about whether building performance policies will expand. In many places, the conversation has moved to how they will actually work.
The panels and research we have participated in this year point toward a clearer shared understanding: data access should be considered early, not after a benchmarking or BPS policy is already in place.
It should be part of policy planning, utility and local government coordination, and the conversation about how building owners will actually comply.
There is still more to learn. Compliance data is not yet consistent enough to establish a clear relationship between different levels of data access and policy compliance, and many BPS programs have not yet reached their first performance deadlines.
But after a year of panels, practitioner conversations, new legislation, and national research, one conclusion is becoming difficult to ignore: whole-building energy data access is becoming part of the infrastructure that makes building performance policy possible.
And if that is true, it raises another important question: what role should utilities play in building that infrastructure, and what do they stand to gain by doing it well?
That is where we will pick up in Part 2.
Want to Learn More?
Better utility data access does more than make benchmarking easier. It can help make building performance policies possible in the first place.
Our newest paper, “Connecting the Dots: How Utility Data Access Enables Building Performance Success,” written for The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE)‘s 2026 Summer Study Buildings, looks at the relationship between whole-building energy data access, benchmarking, and Building Performance Standards (BPS).
Read the full paper and see what the research tells us!
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