Open Data Could Unlock $230 Billion In Energy Efficiency Savings

"Energy-efficiency startups just need access to existing data—on electricity usage, housing characteristics, renovations and financing—to unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, two founders of  startups said in Chicago Tuesday. 'One of the big barriers to scaling energy efficiency is the lack of data in the market,' said Andy Frank of Sealed, a startup that encourages efficiency improvements by guaranteeing homeowners a lower bill than they’re paying now. In a forum hosted by the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago, Frank and Matt Gee of Effortless Energy advocated an open-energy-data warehouse that would collect anonymized forms of existing data from various sources and make the data available for research, government, and industry ..."