Did commercial buildings actually get more efficient?

The entire US commercial building stock used 13.7% less electricity per square foot in 2018 than in 2012: 14.6 kWh per square foot down to 12.6. Over six years, across millions of buildings, that is a substantial result.

15 of the 16 building types improved. Public assembly improved most, from 14.5 to 12.1 kWh per square foot.

Food sales used 9.4% more electricity per square foot than six years earlier, against a stock-wide fall of 13.7%.

Refrigeration is the obvious suspect: a building type dominated by cold storage and display cases cannot retrofit its way out of its main load the way an office can replace lighting. The measure that works for an office does not exist for a chiller aisle.

It is the exception that makes the rest meaningful. A uniform fall across every category would suggest a measurement artefact; a fall everywhere except the most refrigeration-intensive category suggests the improvement is real and its limits are physical.

Hotels, hospitals and food service are the three types that matter most to facility management. Their intensities in 2018 were lodging 14.4, inpatient 28.8, food service 43.8 kWh per square foot.

Those gaps are far wider than the improvement over time, which is the practical point: what a building does still determines its energy cost far more than when it was last refurbished. What that intensity costs in each state turns it into money.

These are national averages by building type. Climate, age, operating hours and occupancy all move an individual building a long way from them, and nothing here adjusts for a warmer decade or for buildings that changed use.

CBECS runs roughly every six years, so this is two snapshots rather than a trend line, and the 2012 round predates most commercial LED adoption. A third vintage for 2003 exists and is left out because it is published in a format this pipeline cannot read.