Data Management Issues Related to Energy Use: A Minnesota Example.

Effective development, implementation, evaluation, and improvement of energy conservation programs requires detailed disaggregate data from individual energy consumers. Unfortunately, the data currently available are generally not adequate to deal with these issues. This paper discusses a data base containing information on 1,860 public buildings in Minnesota. Considerable attention is devoted to questions of data quality. Validation tests are developed and applied to the data from these buildings. Roughly speaking, 15% of the data elements examined were missing and another 15% were almost surely incorrect. These errors greatly complicate management of state and federal programs to audit and retrofit public buildings. They also seriously distort both the descriptive statistics and the regression results obtained from analysis of this data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]