The success of a MEPS depends largely on the confidence building owners, industry and supply chain actors, and financial institutions have in the standard's benchmarking and assessments. For this reason building labelling and benchmarking programs are considered another core building block of the MEPS framework.

Under the European Building Performance Directive (EBPD), building labelling has played a role in helping to gather a comprehensive picture of how a building, or set of buildings, are performing; both in absolute terms and relative to buildings within the same market segments. Data collected through assessments and benchmarking has helped inform the design of Energy Performance Certificates (EPC). Based on a physical assessment of a building, EPCs offer building owners an energy performance rating for their building, as well as suggested steps to improve its performance. Issued for 10-year intervals, EPCs act as a compliance tool and typically assign a building grade ranging from "A" (best) through "G" (worst). In the UK, for example, EPCs are issued for private rental units. Triggered by a change in ownership or tenancy, each building is required to reach at least an "E" rating to be considered an eligible rental unit.

Benchmarking and labelling programs play an important role in contributing to the development of well-designed policies and supports while also moving the market towards increasingly cost-effective retrofits. As more buildings are collected within building labelling and benchmarking programs, the increasing volume of data collected is leveraged to craft a menu of high-impact, cost-effective energy conservation measures for specific archetypes that minimize both the costs associated with future retrofits, as well as any potential unintended consequences of certain measures.

Building labelling and benchmarking was an important aspect of the 2016 Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change which sought to require "labelling of building energy use by as early as 2019." While we have yet to see this commitment realized, there is now in place a patchwork of efforts at the provincial, territorial, and municipal levels. Programs like Ontario's 2016 initiative for the mandatory reporting of energy consumption in large buildings, municipal building energy benchmarking programs, or industry efforts to create dynamic tools to benchmark, and disclose energy use and building energy performance are already helping us understand how energy and emissions performance varies between different segments of the building stock.

In Canada, we have two existing and nationally recognized programs used to measure building performance that have the potential to quickly enable MEPS: the EnerGuide Rating System, and Energy Star Portfolio Manager. With these two energy rating programs, are Canadian governments already well-positioned to implement MEPS for existing buildings? This is a worthy question that we'll revisit in later articles.