July 18, 2013: BPI’s Home Performance Data Standards Published as BPI Standards
Standards Facilitate Transfer of Home Performance-Related Data
“These standards should make the entire home performance industry more effective and profitable by dramatically reducing the costs, time, and effort involved in transferring information,” said Robin LeBaron, managing director of the National Home Performance Council, who coordinated the BPI working group that developed these standards.
“Affordable financing is key to attracting homeowners to the home performance market,” said Larry Zarker, BPI CEO. “In turn, attracting financial investors depends on the accurate transfer of data on each project or pool of projects, so that risk is minimized. This standard will facilitate that seamless transfer of data.”
BPI-2100-S-2013: Standard for Home Performance-Related Data Transfer (dubbed Home Performance XML, or the HPXML standard) provides requirements for an extensible mark-up language (XML) standard data transfer protocol that can be used to transfer home performance-related data between any party involved in a home performance program, including contractors, program administrators, utilities, federal agencies, etc.
BPI-2200-S-2013: Standard for Home Performance-Related Data Collection is designed to facilitate the exchange of information and data among all actors in the home performance industry by providing a standard vocabulary for describing terms related to buildings, energy consumption, and energy conservation measures. Each of the data elements defined in BPI-2200 can be transferred via HPXML.
These data standards were developed by a working group created by BPI’s Standards Technical Committee (STC), which was comprised of subject matter experts representing a variety of interest categories and geographical locations. Several home performance programs and software developers participated in a beta testing process prior to the release of the draft standards. New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) in New York, APS in Arizona, and Local Energy Alliance Program (LEAP) in Virginia have already committed to using HPXML for transferring information from contractors to the program administrator, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is using the draft standard for a research effort on modeling software accuracy.
“The APS Home Performance with Energy Star program will start deploying these standards immediately,” said Gavin Hastings, APS program manager. “In doing so, we can give our contractors more choice in the software tools they use, while providing us consistent and high quality data. This data will help improve the evaluation of our program and allow us to explore innovative strategies to advance the residential retrofit industry.”
BPI-2100 and BPI-2200 are also currently in process to become American National Standards and will undergo a full public comment period at a future date. Once approved by ANSI, they will be republished as ANSI/BPI standards.
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To view the new standards, go to:
• BPI-2100-S-2013 Standard for Home Performance-Related Data Transfer
• BPI-2200-S-2013 Standard for Home Performance-Related Data Collection
For more information on BPI, visit www.bpi.org.
Publication date: 7/15/2013
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