In a great small post Seth Godin writes How much are you going to tip?
He is talking about our need to confrom and that consequently it is easier to enter small markets than big ones and dominate those.
Another take on this is that sometimes an approach to a problem is wrong, but is the one everyone is using. I think energy benchmarking is in danger of fitting this category.
A solution is to offer bespoke solutions that look at each building empirically rather than comparing against the herd