BPI Adds Two Home Performance Standards

Standards Aim to Make Home Performance Industry More Effective, Profitable

MALTA, N.Y. — The Building Performance Institute Inc. (BPI) announced its BPI-2100-S-2013: “Standard for Home Performance-Related Data Transfer” and BPI-2200-S-2013: “Standard for Home Performance-Related Data Collection” have been published as BPI standards.

“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.

BPI-2100-S-2013: Standard for Home Performance-Related Data Transfer — also recognized as 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.

“Affordable financing is key to attracting homeowners to the home-performance market,” said Larry Zarker, CEO, BPI. “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.”

These BPI 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 broad variety of interest categories and geographical locations. These standards have received wide interest, and 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), Arizona Public Service (APS), and Local Energy Alliance Program (LEAP) 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.”

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BPI-2100 and BPI-2200 are also currently in the process to become American National Standards Institute (ANSI) certified and will undergo a full public comment period at a future date, in accordance with ANSI essential requirements. Once approved by ANSI, they will be republished as ANSI/BPI standards.

Publication date: 8/19/2013

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