Challenges in Commercial Buildings

The NREL Commercial Buildings team worked with Target to upgrade the energy efficiency of the Thornton, Colorado, SuperTarget.

Whether you have a single building or a large portfolio, a proven strategy is to focus on the maximum technically feasible energy savings for a given investment at the earliest stages of an energy-efficiency upgrade. This approach involves:

• Developing baselines of current performance and existing building characteristics
• Identifying energy efficiency opportunities in all building systems
• Assessing the energy and economic impacts of various technologies, giving priority to those that save the most energy at the lowest cost.

How can NREL help?

• Superior Energy Performance (SEP) implements the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 50001 energy management framework. NREL's Commercial Building research team is deeply involved in this work, and can ensure your organization stays current with evolving energy performance verification strategies.

• Advanced Energy Design Guides (AEDGs) and Advanced Energy Retrofit Guides (AERGs) provide cost-effective technology roadmaps yielding up to 50% energy savings compared with code in new construction and 30% savings compared with code or current use in existing buildings across a range of commercial sectors. NREL's Commercial Building research team develops the technical support documents for these guides.

• Commercial Building Partnerships (CBP) applies the recommendations of the AEDGs and AERGs to real buildings in collaboration with institutional and private sector partners. NREL's Commercial Building research team works with CBP partners to determine the most cost-effective energy efficiency measures and verify the savings, and the team can use that experience to help you improve energy efficiency in your buildings.

• The OpenStudio platform provides tools for multi-building energy simulation and optimization. It includes cost constraints, and draws efficiency strategies from the Building Component Library. The NREL Commercial Building research team can help you make the most of this powerful tool.

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NREL engineers Michael Deru (left) and Ian Doebber examine night curtains, a proven energy efficiency strategy, at a Whole Foods Market.

The return on your investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy depends on your buildings performing to design expectations. Whether you are a building owner or a utility company investing in efficiency, you can maximize energy savings and minimize frustration by using best practices for:

• Determining what energy uses to measure and how best to measure them to characterize building performance
• Calculating expected energy and cost savings
• Comparing expected performance with measured performance to diagnose problems and identify additional savings opportunities.

How can NREL help?

• The performance metrics project that the NREL Commercial Buildings team co-developed is a source of reliable information for determining your building’s performance.

• OpenStudio can help you calculate expected energy performance and—by comparing with actual measurements—diagnose whether your building meets design expectations.

• The NREL Commercial Buildings team can help you measure energy performance and ensure it matches expectations. NREL has developed best practices during decades of experience on high performance building projects including U.S. Department of Defense installations, big box retail, helping rebuild the town of Greensburg, Kansas, and serving as the owner's representative for the NREL Research Support Facility.

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NREL's Commercial Buildings team works in the Research Support Facility, a living laboratory that incorporates smart design, load reductions, and innovative applications of existing technologies to achieve net zero energy on a fixed budget.

To hit net zero energy cost-effectively, the energy implications of every design decision must be accounted for and tracked from the beginning of the process using an accurate energy model. Radically reduced energy demands result in first-cost savings from downsized HVAC and renewable generation systems. These savings can make net zero energy cost-competitive, especially when combined with available incentives and novel financing arrangements.

Important strategies NREL uses to make net zero energy feasible include:

• Incorporating energy modeling into the delivery process from start to finish.
• Using an integrated design process and whole building systems approach.
• Identifying first-cost savings through smart design and load reduction to achieve energy goals within a capital budget.
• Integrating renewable energy after pursuing all available demand-side savings.
• Coordinating the design process to ensure that all parties are working toward the net zero energy goal.

How can NREL help?

• OpenStudio provides tools and workflows to track energy consumption in a building design from start to finish and to appropriately size HVAC and renewable generation capacity after building energy requirements are minimized.

• The design best practices and lessons NREL learned as the owner's representative on the net zero energy Research Support Facility project are available online, and the researchers who worked on the project are available to provide assistance to public and private sector clients.

• The NREL Commercial Buildings team has a long history of providing technical assistance to improve energy efficiency in real building projects, and these efforts are documented in the High Performance Buildings Database.

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Walmart's Jim McClendon speaks during the Commercial Building Energy Alliances Executive Exchange with Commercial Building Stakeholders forum at NREL.

To deliver a high performance building project on time and on budget, roles, responsibilities, and performance incentives must be clearly defined in the contract. Energy targets and incentives must also be explicitly called out. Through participation in high performance and net zero energy building projects, NREL has developed best practices to assist in:

• Communicating the advantages of performance-based design-build project delivery and implementing performance-based procurement for equipment and buildings.
• Assembling a performance-based request for proposal focused on the project's goals, including energy performance.
• Defining acceptable methods for a design team to demonstrate that a proposed design will hit the performance target.
• Creating a voluntary incentive program to motivate the design and construction team and hold them accountable.
• Identifying best-in-class equipment with proven energy performance and reliability.
• Making economic decisions based on full life cycle cost accounting for the project as a whole.

How can NREL help?

• NREL has documented the successful delivery process for the net zero energy Research Support Facility and has posted the performance-based Request for Proposal (RFP) online.

• The Superior Energy Performance (ISO 50001) effort supported by NREL maintains guidelines for procuring and implementing energy efficiency technologies.

• The NREL-supported Commercial Building Energy Alliances provide a forum for commercial building owners, operators, and suppliers to share best practices and lessons learned about energy efficiency strategies and technologies.

• NREL's U.S. Life Cycle Inventory Database broadens the scope of analysis from operational energy savings to cradle-to-grave impacts.

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NREL senior engineer Eric Kozubal examines a prototype airflow channel for the desiccant-enhanced evaporative (DEVap) air conditioner. The colored graph shows how hot humid air (red) changes to cool dry air (blue) as it passes through the DEVap core.

• Next generation HVAC to radically cut energy consumption while improving comfort and air quality
  • Liquid Desiccant Air Conditioning (LDAC)
  • Desiccant-enhanced evaporative air conditioner (DEVap, an R&D 100 winner)
  • An advanced HVAC testing facility that private sector partners can use for neutral third party performance measurements.
• Sensors and controls to improve energy performance and building comfort
  • Building Agent, a software solution to collect occupant feedback and building measurements and communicate performance with occupants and facility managers
  • Web applications for whole building performance visualization
  • Image Processing Occupancy Sensor (IPOS), a next generation sensing solution that combines occupancy detection and classification, daylight harvesting, and security in one low-cost device.
• Energy analysis tools
  • User-focused OpenStudio-based applications as well as an OpenStudio software development kit (SDK) that enables extremely rapid application development, reducing time to market and development costs.
• The Energy Innovation Portal identifies leading edge energy technologies that can be licensed for use in the private sector, and the soon-to-be-launched Technology Portal gathers performance data.

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