This dashboard showcases the data from the 2018 U.S. Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), conducted regularly by the Energy Information Agency (EIA). This is a building characteristics survey that draws on information from over 6,000 respondents across the country, on the census region and division level. The unit of measurement in this survey is “commercial building.” Explore key indicators across our dashboard pages, such as all-electric buildings, heat pump deployment, regional heating mix, renovation stats, and more. Click through the top purple horizontal ribbon to move across the dashboard pages.

To drill through to a specific data view, right-click on a data bar of your choice, select “drill through,” and click “geographic.” Likewise, to filter an entire page for a single or multiple indicators, select indicators through the yellow filter bar on the right. Text located at the top of visuals relays what data you are looking at regarding geography (region or division). Use the maps to filter a single visual for a specific geography. Learn more about the 2018 CBECS survey here. If you have any questions, please contact info@atlasbuildingshub.com.

To see our previous CBECS and RECS dashboard, visit our archives page here. Click here for more information about the EIA Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey.

See our methodology and other FAQs down below.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) conducts studies of the country’s commercial and residential building stock using a representative sample survey of buildings combined with data from energy suppliers. Atlas relies on the publicly available microdata from the Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) from EIA, to construct the Commercial Building Characteristics dashboard. The most recent data available from the EIA covers buildings surveyed in 2018.

To filter an entire page for a single division or region, select that division or region in the yellow filter bar to the right. Doing so will filter the entire page and all visuals for that specific jurisdiction. If in doubt, indicative text on the top of every visual informs the user of what data they are looking at below (a specific division, region, or national data). Likewise, to filter a single visual on a page (e.g., heat pump deployment and space heating mix), you can click on the map to filter that specific visual for a single region or division. Always check the geography headers and your filters to see what data you are viewing.

This dashboard showcases a wide variety of data views beyond those in the default page setting, providing users a “choose-your-own-adventure” functionality with targeted drill throughs. For example, right click on a data bar of your choice, select “drill through,” and click “geographic.” The resulting map graphic is a targeted view of just that selected data for all regions in terms of absolute buildings and relative share in the region.

For example, on the default (national) space heating and cooling page, right-click on the “propane” data bar under “fuel type.” Select “drill through” followed by “geographic.” This resulting map will display the number of buildings per region reporting propane as the primary space heating fuel and the relative share of propane in the building heating mix per region. The darker the region, the higher the relative share. For any data point where this function is available, the “drill through” option will populate in the right-click menu.

The primary unit for this dashboard, as understood from the 2018 CBECS, is “commercial buildings.”

CBECS does not include a datapoint specifically on the use of electric heat pumps, so that datapoint is calculated by Atlas staff from a series of survey questions. We counted respondents as using electric heat pumps for space heating if they answered “yes” for having an electric heat pump, either yes or “space heaters are both packaged terminal heat pumps and other types” for the question “space heaters are packaged terminal heat pumps” or yes for “heat pump in packaged unit.”

The relative percentage of buildings with electric heat pumps for space heating is calculated from just those buildings that have heating equipment. The same is true for the share of buildings with primary electric space heating (only those buildings with heating equipment are included in the calculation).

If you have any questions on how these or other variables were calculated, please reach out to info@atlasbuildingshub.com.

We classify a commercial building as all-electric if the primary fuel used for space AND water heating is electricity; when cooking is a relevant activity in the building, the classification also requires primary use of an electric stovetop. We do not take into account cooling, because it is extremely rare for a building to have non-electric cooling when it already relies on electric space heating.