U.S. commercial buildings consumed around 18% of total primary energy in 2017 and a 2.23 EJ increase is expected by 2050. Energy-related data for commercial buildings can be used for various applications, including benchmarking, building component analysis, market potential analysis, and policy making. Although there are plenty of data sources for energy usage in commercial buildings, they have not been thoroughly reviewed and summarized. As a result, users do not have comprehensive guidelines about selections of right data sources for specific application needs. To fill this gap, this paper conducts a comprehensive review to summarize data sources for energy usage in U.S. commercial buildings and discuss their usages for different applications. First, the paper summarizes the survey and simulation data sources for energy usage. The data sources are compared in terms of their data collection methods, released information, and relevant features. Second, this paper analyzes the applications for different survey and simulation data sources. This review categorizes the applications of data sources into five categories, including energy performance benchmarks, energy use forecasts and predictions, energy use contributions of building components, supports of building energy policies, and urban-scale energy use analysis. Moreover, the paper introduces several cases to demonstrate the usages of these data sources.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.