Opportunities and Benefits for HPXML Adoption

HPXML was created to achieve some basic goals that are critical to a growing industry:

1. Standardize terminology and facilitate the collection of higher quality data as a means to track and quantify the work being completed across the residential energy-efficiency industry.
2. Create interoperability between software systems to allow the transfer of home performance data across a diverse set of market actors.
3. Improve industry efficiency by reducing the costs of data collection and exchange between market actors.

Once adopted, HPXML has the potential to dramatically lower costs in a wide range of areas as software vendors can use off-the-shelf solutions that they have already developed, rather than building new systems for each client. If this is done in coordination with other programs, utilities, and governments implementing HPXML, it can not only lower operational costs, but provide access to a wide range of new opportunities to help grow the local energy efficiency marketplace.

To illustrate the potential opportunities created by HPXML, Figure 3 offers a visualization of data flow for most program environments today, pre-HPXML. This is compared to a post-HPXML marketplace (Figure 4) in which home energy upgrades are captured and transferred in a more standardize way and available to a larger number of market actors. This new data flow will facilitate emerging opportunities in the valuation of energy efficiency and the availability of financing for home energy upgrades.

While these opportunities are expansive, it is important to identify priorities that are right for your program or jurisdiction and to stage adoption of these initiatives over time.

To help better clarify some of the opportunities that are available and encourage getting the most out of HPXML, several ideas have been identified at the trade ally, program and national levels for your consideration. These opportunities are as follows:

Trade Ally and Contractor Opportunities

Participation in home performance or other energy-efficiency programs can help contractors increase access to financing or incentives and align with marketing and education efforts to promote their business. HPXML can let contracting companies develop or procure systems that ease the burden of reporting to programs, while improving the process for sales and customer engagement. Some of the opportunities for contractors include:

• Reduce Data Collection Burden for Program Participation. Many of the HPXML-compliant software tools offer contractors a more streamlined modeling or data collection experience. Contractors can choose tools that better align with their business models, improving primary data collection and significantly reducing the need to fill out rebate forms, retype data collected in the field and streamline job processing. For example, based on a survey of contractors before and after the implementation of their HPXML based program, contractors participating in Arizona Public Service’s Home Performance with ENERGY STAR program, reported an average 31% reduction in administrative time after switching to the new program system.
• Improved Sales Tools. HPXML-compliant software tools offer a wide range of sales tools that can enable contractors to offer a more customizable experience aligned with their customer’s needs. This can help increase conversion rates and assist in the sales process to acquire larger projects and more savings.
• Improve Business Analytics and Quality Management. Standardization of performance data through HPXML enhances the opportunities to integrate this information into a contractor’s business systems. Using HPXML data, contractors are evolving the way they can track performance drivers within projects to improve the delivery of internal quality management systems. Additionally, enhanced tracking and trend analysis can help contracting companies better identify key drivers that impact profitability, customer satisfaction, and the performance of their products. These efforts can help grow the business and deliver more consistent and reliable performance.
• Acquiring New Investment Resources. As better data on energy efficiency improvements is transparent and easily shared within the market, the opportunity to recruit new financing resources increases. This can help grow the market while reducing the dependency on program funding to facilitate that growth.

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Program, Utility and Local Governmental Jurisdictional Opportunities

Faster and more flexible tools can lower program costs, increase trade ally satisfaction, improve data quality, and drive innovation into programs. Working together with local contractors, an HPXML implementation will not only yield benefits to the program, but can assist in making program efforts more transparent to the larger market of homeowners. The following are some of the opportunities for HPXML that are being used by programs today:

• Create an Open Modelling Software Market. HPXML allows participating contractors to choose which soft- ware tool they want to use for energy modeling. Implementing HPXML can streamline the process for contractors to submit consistent information to the program using a variety of tools. This can improve contractor satisfaction and reduce their labor per project by allowing them to choose the products that work best with their business model. Adding this flexibility in the program can be an important step toward accelerating the energy efficiency marketplace, by encouraging the growth of innovative tools and approaches.
• Adoption of Mobile Data Collection Apps. The ability to collect data on a mobile device can save time and reduce reporting errors. By coding these apps to HPXML, the data can be exported and stored in a standardized format that aligns with national reporting requirements and can be easily integrated with other software products. For example, if you are administering a low-income weatherization program, field staff can us HPXML based mobile applications that sync to a central program database. Once in a central database the tools can be used for reporting, quality assurance, and data analysis across jurisdictions. This can reduce cost, but more importantly make it easier to track performance drivers against other HPXML jurisdictions.
• Streamlined Quality Assurance (QA). As data becomes more standardized and consistent across multiple jurisdictions, software developers are creating more advanced QA systems to evaluate incoming data and guide quality assurance activities. As desk reviews of projects for compliance with incentives and program rules become more automated, the more quality can be maintained while reducing labor costs to manually review files. For one of the pilot programs, Arizona Public Service, time spent completing desk QA reviews decreased by as much as 50% per project. In many implementations, programs are pursuing automated approvals that can allow contractors to seek incentives or financing approvals while they are still on-site with the customer and further reduce the program administration costs per project while improving assessment-to-upgrade conversion ratios.
• Improved Program Analytics. Improving both the quality and consistency of the data collected allows pro- grams to complete comprehensive, ongoing analytics. HPXML data extracts can speed up or enhance measurement and evaluation efforts, while making it easier to compare program performance characteristics with other programs. For example, if multiple programs use HPXML and one of the program is showing better results than the others, it will be easier with HPXML to identify trends in your program that are attributed to the performance differences. This can then be compared to other programs who are tracking the same data, to better identify and share best practices.
• Targeted or Trigger Based Marketing. HPXML can help programs capture details about a home’s characteristics using online or in-field audit tools. Integrating HPXML data into marketing analytics can help identify customers with a higher likelihood for savings or participation. This data can then be used to guide ongoing marketing investments by providing recommendations to customers that are most meaningful for their home and facilitate staging upgrade activities over time.
• Export for Local Real Estate. Coordinating with local real estate and appraisal networks can identify data points and export strategies that work for those markets. This could include publishing completion certificates, providing the data to populate the Appraisal Institute’s Green and Energy Efficient Addendum or directly export data to the local Multiple Listing Service. Doing this can help increase the value of energy efficiency in the real estate transaction and provide greater incentive and investment opportunity for homeowners to fund energy efficiency upgrades.

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Regional and National Opportunities

Collecting standardized data sets across multiple programs and jurisdictions is a critical step in helping guide national policy, financial investments, and research. Adoption of HPXML commands higher quality data and transfer of that data to a variety of actors in a cost-efficient manner:

• Reporting to DOE or EPA Administered Programs. Whether participating in Home Performance with ENERGY STAR, Low Income Weatherization, or as an EPA ENERGY STAR Partner, HPXML can lower the cost and burden of data collection and reporting.
• Regional or National Data Repositories. Managed by federal agencies, trade ally associations, or other national organizations committed to the advancement of energy-efficiency investments, these repositories can organize data to track and quantify impacts of energy efficiency. Efforts like the Building Performance Database Website or the Standard Energy Efficiency Data Platform will not only make it easier for programs to collect and share data, but can allow the industry to compare results, improve transparency, and better identify performance drivers for program success.
• Coordination with Market Research. National research efforts, whether lead by the Department of Energy, universities, industry organizations, or private companies, have struggled to get consistent and reliable data from multiple jurisdictions. By adopting HPXML, users can more easily participate in these efforts and gain valuable insights into a program’s performance and the opportunities for emerging technologies in markets.

Beyond data collection and reporting, there are a number of national efforts that the interoperability of HPXML can facilitate. While new efforts are continually emerging, the following are some examples of current or emerging opportunities:

• DOE Home Energy Score. This tool allows homeowners to compare the energy performance of their homes to other homes nationwide. By collecting data in the field with an HPXML-compliant tool and transferring it to DOE’s application program interface (API) a Home Energy Score can be generated in real time, and minimizes integration costs.

  The seamless integration of Home Energy Score through HPXML can make it easier for contractors and auditors to generate this simple 1 to 10 scale for your customers. This easy to understand score, combined with the standardized collection of data across Home Energy Score partners and jurisdictions can assist in raising the transparency of energy efficiency upgrades within your local market. As more homes are scored, this information should be shared with the real estate community and included in general consumer education campaigns to improve awareness, drive the value of energy efficiency, and increase project volume.

  For more information visit Home Energy Score.

• EPA ENERGY STAR Home Advisor. Create a profile of home energy efficiency features to receive a prioritized, customized list of energy-saving recommendations. Programs that complete on-line or in-person energy audits with HPXML-compliant tools could allow customers to upload their recommendations, track their progress over time, and receive other energy-saving information from the EPA. For more information go to the Home Energy Advisor.

• Multiple Listing Services. Being able to accurately track energy efficiency improvements and make them known to potential home buyers is a critical step in facilitating recognition of energy efficiency in the valuation of homes. The HPXML effort has been coordinated with Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS), which is a national data standard from the Real Estate Standards Organization. The multiple listing services, which represent the backbone of that real estate information industry, use RETS to maintain consistent data. For more information, see BPI-2101-S-2013 Standard Requirements for a Certificate of Completion for Residential Energy Upgrades.

These are several of the recognized opportunities that have emerged to date. While others are being created all the time, it is recommended to start with those that are most relevant to your jurisdiction and incorporate them into your implementation plan as described in the next section of this guide.

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