Smart Buildings, Stupid Data: Why Your Energy Baseline is Lying to You

If your baseline data is rubbish… everything else is just beautifully polished nonsense. 

It sounds harsh, but in smart buildings and energy management, everything—analytics, targets, optimisation—starts with the baseline. And when that foundation is wrong, no amount of tech or good intentions will give you an honest picture of your building’s performance.

If your baseline is flawed, then every calculation, comparison, and “savings” claim might be fiction dressed up in charts. 

The Silent Saboteur: Bad Baseline Data 

A recent article on how poor master data undermines utility audits got us thinking that smart buildings are sitting on the same ticking time bomb. 

Let’s set the scene. 

You’ve invested in a Building Management System (BMS). It’s tracking temperature curves, benchmarking energy use, and alerting you to inefficiencies in real-time. But there’s a catch: 

• The HVAC zones haven’t been updated since your office renovation in 2018. 

• Lighting circuits are still labelled like a scavenger hunt. 

• Your “baseline” includes a defunct server room that now hosts yoga at 6 p.m. 

The result? Your energy dashboard is comparing today’s performance to an alternate reality. Decisions are being made on ghosts of past floor plans, abandoned infrastructure, and inaccurate assumptions.  

The Illusion of Insight 

This kind of misalignment causes ripple effects that are easy to miss but hard to undo: 

• Misleading savings claims: Improvements might look good on paper but are grounded in faulty assumptions. 

• Anomalies get buried: Real operational issues are obscured by noisy, irrelevant data. 

• Occupant discomfort: Complaints rise while the system insists everything’s fine. 

• Net-zero strategies built on fiction: You can’t reduce what you’re not accurately measuring. 

In short: the building thinks it’s doing great. The reality? Not so much. 

What Better Looks Like 

Improving this isn’t just about fixing a spreadsheet, it requires a mindset shift.

Accurate baselines should be: 

• Dynamic: Reflecting real-time usage patterns, not outdated assumptions. 

• Action-oriented: Data should lead to action, like identifying unoccupied floors that use more energy overnight than during the day. 

• Context-aware: Energy use, occupancy patterns, and equipment schedules should align. If they don’t, you’re likely missing something important.  
  
  

The Path Forward: Evidence Over Vibes 

Energy management systems in smart buildings can’t run on vibes. It needs real, contextual, and current data. The foundation must be solid before you start building optimisations on top of it. 

So, before your BMS starts shouting about kilowatt-hour savings, ask yourself: is my baseline even accurate?

Because if not, you’re not measuring energy use, you’re just measuring noise. 

Find out what dynamic energy baselines actually look like in practice.

At measurable.energy, we’re rethinking how buildings understand their energy use. Find out more here.