The granularity gap: how data architecture and contextual data richness shape the governance and implementation of building energy performance

Abstract Delivering Europe’s building-sector decarbonisation targets depends not only on technical solutions, but on energy data infrastructures that support implementation, verification, and learning in practice. While recent European policies increasingly emphasise performance-based approaches, existing energy-data infrastructures remain primarily oriented toward regulatory compliance and billing, limiting their usefulness for addressing real-world performance shortfalls. This paper examines how building energy data infrastructures shape what aspects of performance become visible and governable in practice. It develops and applies a three-axis analytical framework—spatial granularity, temporal granularity, and contextual data richness—to assess how different data configurations condition analytical and implementation capacity. Contextual data richness is defined as the technical and social information required to interpret measured energy use in relation to building systems, operation, and use. The framework is applied to three contrasting Norwegian cases: municipal energy performance certificates combined with aggregated energy data, hourly smart-meter data subject to governance and access constraints, and high-frequency circuit-level monitoring in a university living lab. The analysis shows that low-resolution compliance data support benchmarking but obscure causal drivers; smart-meter data improve temporal visibility but remain limited by governance and weak contextual integration; and high-resolution living-lab data reveal operational dynamics yet remain difficult to interpret and scale without complementary contextual information. The findings demonstrate that implementation challenges in the building sector stem not from a lack of data per se, but from misalignment between policy ambitions and the configuration of existing data infrastructures. The paper concludes by discussing implications for performance-based regulation, EPC reform, and the design of energy-data infrastructures capable of supporting scalable and verifiable implementation of building-sector decarbonisation policies.