B3 uses the terms Site, Building, and non-building often. Though similar in nature, each one has an important distinction within the application.
A Building is a physical structure that consumes energy or water. A building typically has a primary building type, though it can contain multiple building types. Each building type can be configured into multiple space usage areas, each with their own schedules and conditioning properties. Parking lots and parking garages are typically associated to a building if they share meters.
A Site is a container for a building and its meters, or a container for multiple buildings that share meters. The operative word here being ‘shared’.
If a college campus has 10 buildings, and they all share a central steam plant, it should be created as a multibuilding site with 10 buildings within it. The meter editor lets you select all the buildings that a meter serves.
If a college campus has 10 buildings and each building is separately metered or sub-metered, it should be created as 10 unique sites so that each site can be measured individually. Those sites can be nested under a sub organization so they can be analyzed as a whole.
A Non-Building is a site that consumes energy or water but does not contain any physical building structures. Typical examples include streetlights, communication towers and EV charging stations. Non-buildings are not able to calculate a benchmark or ENERGY STAR score, but they can be tracked for general usage and baseline comparisons.