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• Approach for identification of entities that are operating within the same context. • Contextualisation of energy consumption is essential for performance monitoring. • Approach with the potential for sound decision support of the energy manager. • Combination of two different methods provided additional and valuable information. The European Union has identified buildings as the most promising targets for improving energy efficiency and has quantified a significant energy saving potential associated with the refurbishment of a building's envelope and the installation of new technologies. The key objective of monitoring and modelling energy profiles in buildings is to provide the necessary background on energy consumption and to allow informed decisions to be made. The modelling usually starts with the integration of energy into the activity flow charts, which is the basis for the decisions on setting up the structure of energy cost centres. This paper evaluates the capabilities of data envelopment analysis in combination with energy cost centre based modelling for the electricity consumption analysis of a selected group of elementary schools and kindergartens. The electricity consumption data was obtained in cooperation with a local energy agency, which was acting as the energy manager for the selected group of buildings. The results confirmed the potential of combining the data envelopment analysis and the energy cost centre based modelling in order to properly identify the schools having the potential for energy efficiency improvements. Additionally, the combination of results obtained with the data envelopment analysis and the contextual parameters hidden in the structure of energy cost centres provides additional and valuable information for the energy manager and helps him with proper benchmarking of the analysed energy management practices. The results encouraged the energy manager to look for concrete opportunities to improve the energy efficiency and revealed that electricity savings of up to 14% could be achieved with better energy management in the selected group of buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]