Building Performance Data: USA trying to catch up to China

The US Green Building Council (USGBC) – the organization that develops LEED certification for buildings – has just announced the upcoming launch of ‘arc’, a data driven platform designed to collect and report performance data of buildings. Once it is up and running, it will herald the dawn of a new era for buildings. During the launch, current and future supporting technologies were also announced, technologies necessary for this new era to rise.

Meanwhile in China, this is already well under way and the technologies are already available. While the USA is announcing the dawn of a new era, China is already moving onto lunch.

At the forefront of this is an innovative building standard called RESET. Born in China, it is the world’s first sensor-based, real-time, performance driven building standard. Over three years ago, RESET also developed the world’s first (and only) international standard for building monitors and sensors tracking indoor environmental quality.

But this is not just a China story: RESET is also the first building standard to grow internationally from the China.

Although this may seem surprising to many in the West, it really shouldn’t be. Necessity is the mother of innovation, and nowhere is the need for building performance data greater than in China, particularly when it comes to healthy indoor environments. The market adoption of RESET has been inspiring and provides insights for the rest of the world.

RESET is levelling the playing field for real-estate developers by providing a transparent monitoring and communication standard for the health performance of buildings. Several months ago, the standard was adopted by UBAN, the world’s largest commercial real-estate platform, providing them with the ability to benchmark buildings. The adoption cemented RESET as the market standard – a testament to the power of open and actionable building data.

UBAN has adopted RESET as a benchmarking and rating tool.

Seeing as data from RESET certified projects is reported in real-time it means the data is actionable, aligning building owners, employers and employees towards achieving the most high performance spaces possible. Although real-time data may seem like a threat and liability to many building owners and employers in the West, in China it has proved to be the opposite, enabling these parties to take action and fix issues before employees monitor and report issues themselves. It is also enabling developers to attract tenants, as evidenced by UBAN.

The adoption of RESET’s monitoring standard has also been impressive – a subject the USA has not yet even breached. While the USA has primarily focused on how to get low-cost consumer grade monitors into buildings, the scale of China has allowed RESET to define a whole new tier of high-quality building grade sensors. At the time of writing, seven hardware companies are actively working towards the standard. So far only four have passed, with three being Chinese and only one being American. RESET has also correctly separated hardware and software standards, prioritizing platforms that are open to collaboration. This enables hardware agnostic platforms such as Qlear to stream data from the world’s increasing number of hardware makers, compare results, plug into the RESET cloud for certification analytics while also serving WELL and LEED projects. The future is here.

RESET links with data aggregators such as QLEAR and helps with LEED and WELL certification.

The world is increasingly becoming flat and large scale innovations are now flowing out of China – in areas the world does not associate with the country – such as open data and transparency. While the USA is busy thinking through how all the pieces of a green/healthy building data ecosystem will fit together, it is worth taking a moment to learn from what is happening in China – and now flowing to the rest of the world.