The City of Atlanta announced today its partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s SEED Platform Collaborative, an initiative which promotes state and local governments, non-profits and private companies to work with the buildings sector to incorporate more data-driven practices. As part of the collaboration, the City of Atlanta will work with DOE to establish plans to help implement benchmarking and building performance tracking, in addition to providing input on improvements that can be made to the Platform™ itself and sharing best practices.

The Collaborative is a part of the DOE’s Better Buildings Initiative, which is aimed at achieving the goal of doubling American energy productivity by year 2030 while motivating corporate and public sector leaders across the country to save energy through commitments and investments.

“The City of Atlanta is pleased to participate in the SEED Platform Collaborative,” said Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, Director of Sustainability. “This strategic partnership encourages enforcement of Atlanta’s Commercial Buildings Energy Efficiency Ordinance which will help the City of Atlanta meet its goals to increase energy efficiency, promote market transparency in commercial buildings, create jobs and reduce carbon emissions.”

The SEED Platform Collaborative’s three-year partnership will provide support to collect, clean and manage data from different sources across large building portfolios. The City of Atlanta and its partners will receive assistance with the initial setup and implementation of the SEED Platform™, ongoing technical support, business process support, complimentary hosting services and access to a peer community of users and developers to share feedback and solutions.

“We are excited to formalize our partnership with City of Atlanta to lay the data foundation for smarter policymaking and investments around energy performance in buildings. A wide range of data is becoming increasingly available about buildings’ characteristics and energy performance. We see the City of Atlanta is an early innovator in ways to maximize the use of this information in practice, and their work with SEED Collaborative will provide a replicable model for other jurisdictions across the country,” said Elena Alschuler, the Building Technologies Project Manager at the U.S. Department of Energy.