The WegoScore

A WegoScore is the simplest useful indicator of building efficiency.

There are actually three scores, covering different aspects of your building's operations:

Energy WegoScore - describes the energy efficiency of your building, based on site energy

Carbon WegoScore - describes the carbon impact of your building's energy usage, based on source energy

Water WegoScore - describes the water efficiency of your building

Each score is on a scale of 1-100, where 100 is the top (most efficient) score.

The Algorithm

The algorithm we use to calculate WegoScores is simple, but powerful:

  1. We first group buildings based on their type and climate zone.
    • There are four types of buildings, based on size.
    • There are eight climate zones.
  2. We then calculate the normalized full-year usage for each building in a group.
    • Buildings must have 12 consecutive months of full-building data from the past 15 months.
    • We normalize by square footage for the energy and carbon scores, and by the number of bedrooms for the water score.
  3. We assign a score to your building based on where it falls in the resulting distribution.
    • We account for outliers by cutting off the tail ends of the distributions. Currently, the worst 5% of buildings are all assigned a score of 1, and the best 5% a score of 100.
    • Beyond that, the score is proportional to where a building's normalized usage falls in comparison to the cutoff points.

Simple and Effective

We've designed the WegoScore to be incredibly easy to use, but also very powerful.

The algorithm above describes the entire process, and we've made it public here for anyone to see. We created the WegoScore after spending significant time researching and analyzing a variety of other scoring approaches, including Energy Star. We were dissatisfied with these other options, because they were overly complex, built on very small data sets, and didn't provide scores that had meaningful interpretations.

The WegoScore:

  • is easy to understand, and easy for others in the industry to validate.
  • reflects the relative difference between buildings' efficiencies, so increasing a building's score from 60 to 70 is the same efficiency gain as increasing the score from 70 to 80.
  • is built using the world's biggest set of multifamily building performance data.

What you get

Within WegoWise, you'll be able to see a full page showing the details about your building's WegoScores:

Your building's WegoScore details

Changes & Limitations

The WegoScore will be constantly improving, as we get more data and find ways to improve our algorithm. Any changes we make to our scoring algorithm will be publicly documented on this page along with the date of the change.

The WegoScore is currently only available for multifamily buildings. We only consider buildings with full-building energy or water data in our algorithm.