Retrieval over Reasoning: A Cost-Controlled Benchmark of Language Models for Energy-Retrofit Recommendation
Recommending the correct set of energy conservation measures (ECMs) for a building is a structured, multi-label prediction problem in which a task-specific supervised model has weak training signal and a general language model has no grounding in the local building stock. We study this problem on 10,422 real New York City Local Law 87 (LL87) energy-audit records, taking as ground truth the set of ECM categories that certified auditors actually recommended. We make four contributions. First, we establish that energy-use-intensity (EUI) prediction - the upstream task - is effectively solved by tree ensembles: across fifteen trained models, a stacking ensemble reaches a coefficient of determination R^2 = 0.757, and every one of six neural architectures is outperformed by gradient-boosted trees. Second, we show that the framing of the recommendation task dominates model choice: recasting ECM recommendation as 19-way multi-label classification rather than single-label categorization lifts a gradient-boosted-tree baseline from a previously reported 25.9% accuracy to a micro-F1 of 0.571. Third, we benchmark eight large language models (LLMs) from four providers in a 2x2 design that independently toggles retrieval grounding and explicit reasoning, scoring each arm on per-label F1, U.S.-dollar cost per building, and latency; retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves micro-F1 by +0.11 to +0.20 on every model, while explicit reasoning yields no measurable accuracy change (-0.018 to +0.010) at up to 8.4x the cost. Fourth, we show LLMs systematically over-recommend - high recall, low precision - and that retrieval closes the gap chiefly by improving precision. A 70-billion-parameter open-weight model with a fifteen-line nearest-neighbor retrieval step reaches 0.511 micro-F1 at $0.00032 per building, comparable to a frontier model at roughly 10.1x lower cost.