When I was listening to your question, the first thing that came to my mind was that there are many departments that have many different buildings in their portfolio, or buildings that they occupy, whether it's a portion of a building or the entire building. The first step is to take a look at all of those buildings, bring the stats to the table in an Excel spreadsheet—it's really simple—and just look within their own portfolio at what they are paying per square foot for energy. This is a very simple analysis of what it's costing them, what energy they're using.
Out of that, you start to pick off what the big uses are, where the problems are or where the opportunities are—there are never any “problems”—and start working it from there. There is an abundance of re-commissioning exercises sometimes referred to as low cost or no cost types of measures. There is a large number of individual companies or of specialists who can be brought in to take a look and size up the opportunity. It isn't that difficult.
So even within government departments, there's an opportunity to identify, even if they don't have a benchmark, how they are doing within their own set of buildings and spaces.