Portfolio Solutions

Market Challenge

The diverse nature of ownership makes achieving scale in this market sector particularly difficult. Developing solutions that overcome challenges at the building level is critical but only if these solutions are developed in tandem with solutions that make it easier for large numbers of retrofits to be performed. The stakeholders most capable of reaching large volumes of buildings are state and city governments, utilities, and owners of large portfolios. Solutions at this scale require different approaches. For example, there are often large quantities of data that need to be combined and analyzed to prioritize retrofit opportunities, and the data may be in the hands of different stakeholders. Energy consumption data may be available at a fine scale at the utility level but not accessible by a building owner. Or a city or utility may lack access to data about the building stock that would allow them to develop programs that incentivize retrofits. Even portfolio owners may not have a good understanding of the performance of buildings in their portfolio, but completing energy audits of every building in their portfolio may be cost prohibitive, so they require solutions that make the process of prioritizing investments in their portfolio easier.

Approach

CBEI has played a strong role in developing and promoting solutions on a portfolio scale. To help prioritize efforts in this space, CBEI conducted a review of current and trending policies, regulatory strategies, and incentive programs that have the most significant bearing on the implementation of retrofits in commercial buildings. This research set the agenda for the CBEI portfolio work. CBEI has focused primarily on developing best practices in building performance transparency and benchmarking, testing approaches useful for utilities to reach more customers in their energy efficiency programs, demonstrating the value of solutions that can be applied at a portfolio level to better gauge building performance, and developing guidance that helps regulators and the building owners more effectively meet codes and standards.

A consistent approach that CBEI has applied in portfolio solutions is to engage with and connect the relevant stakeholders throughout the process of developing solutions. Developing a solution that provides value to each of the stakeholders ensures greater uptake of the solution in a region — and nationally. For example, CBEI was instrumental in convening the City of Philadelphia, PECO, and building owners to identify the value of a benchmarking ordinance to each stakeholder. This approach has since been replicated in multiple cities around the country to bring stakeholders together to improve access to energy consumption data and enable a deeper understanding of the performance of buildings in a region, which allows owners to better prioritize retrofits and cities and utilities to better design programs that incentivize energy efficiency.

IMPACTS

Transparency and Benchmarking

CBEI and the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission convened the Regional Data Management Working Group to develop best practices to make energy consumption data more transparent for building owners and operators. The Working Group — comprised of local utilities, regulators, building owners and experts from the real estate industry — produced the Utilities’ Guide to Data Access for Building Benchmarking. The guide is an introduction to the challenges and opportunities for implementing data accessibility practices, with case studies of successful programs.

CBEI applied the successful strategies developed for the Philadelphia region to support 22 city-utility pairs develop similar data accessibility programs through the Department of Energy’s Energy Data Accelerator (EDA). CBEI published a program inception checklist, a series of instructional case studies, and a list of cities that will continue to act as mentors to their peers looking to replicate their successes. CBEI expertise and guidance materials were instrumental in helping cities in their efforts to achieve the EDA goal of whole building data access for at least twenty percent of commercial and/or multi-family building owners by the end of 2015.

CBEI took an early lead in developing solutions to support benchmarking of building energy performance on a regional scale. CBEI supported the City of Philadelphia as it implemented its ordinance in 2012, acting as a neutral party to convene stakeholder meetings and providing technical expertise on the value of understanding how building energy performance compares regionally. CBEI used this experience to help develop solutions for regions to make use of benchmarking data. CBEI produced the Benchmarking Data Analytics Guide to help municipalities and other entities that may need to analyze large sets of building data. The guide has content tailored to beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels and helps analysts understand how to check data quality, analyze the results across multiple characteristics (e.g., building usage), and identify building segments that may be candidates for retrofits. CBEI has pushed these guides out nationally. CBEI also collaborated with utility incentive program administrators to develop approaches for using benchmarking data to more specifically target buildings for incentives, making it easier for program administrators to reach the best candidates and therefore reduce the overhead cost of an incentive program. These transparency and benchmarking tools are available at www.cbei.psu.edu.

CBEI developed a highly accurate method to assess the sources of building energy use thanks to the large sets of building energy data available from benchmarking programs across the country. CBEI studied 44 building attributes that could be collected without actually entering the building and found that as few as 23 of them could be used to discern energy use.

Portfolio Tools

CBEI has developed and supported deployment of multiple tools useful for portfolio managers to better understand the performance of their assets as well as improve occupant health and comfort.

The Department of Energy has developed the Asset Score Tool (AST) as an easy way to determine the energy performance of a building’s physical characteristics independent of occupant behavior. AST provides upgrade recommendations for each building system. CBEI created an easy-to-use interactive guide and video demonstration to introduce users to the AST. CBEI then took the tool on the road, finding market leaders to test the tool and adopt it to assess their own building stock. This engagement reached more than sixty organizations.

CBEI helped market leaders test the Asset Score Tool and adopt it to assess their own building stock.

Recognizing the importance of occupant health and comfort in the long-term value of an asset to a portfolio owner, CBEI developed approaches and tools for post retrofit evaluation and measurement of indoor environmental quality (IEQ). The IEQ study was undertaken to assess spatial and environmental conditions as well as user satisfaction in the workplace before and after a retrofit.

The set of measures include: as-built records of the technical attributes of building systems; spot measurements using the National Environmental Assessment Toolkit (NEAT) instrument cart and 24-hour continuous measurements using Aircuity optima unit for the thermal, air quality, acoustic, and visual conditions in the workplace; and short-term user satisfaction questionnaires in the sampled workstations. The study was focused on measuring IEQ on a winter day — thermal, air, lighting and acoustics — capturing the physical attributes of the building systems that may be critical to those measurements as well as user satisfaction on a “right-now” basis for comparison to the measurements. This IEQ study will be used by the energy retrofit project team to prioritize energy conservation measures, and where possible to provide further cost-benefit justifications for energy retrofit investments.

CBEI also developed enhancements to the Department of Energy’s Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) platform that helps manage energy data of large groups of buildings. Enhancements allow SEED to retrieve, store, and analyze 15-minute data which is increasingly available with the advent of smart meters. The ability of the platform to import data from multiple sources will provide actionable intelligence for cities and other large portfolio owners to support operational optimization and investment.

Utility Programs

CBEI has collaborated with local utilities and the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission to demonstrate several solutions useful for utility programs. This collaboration extends across multiple research areas. For example, incentive program administrators were engaged for the HVAC and wall retrofit solutions to help guide the development of those packages such that the packages could more easily be incorporated into an incentive program. CBEI also collaborated with the Food Trust to identify simple retrofit packages for small corner stores to support the development of a direct install incentive program.

A key challenge for smaller commercial retrofits is access to capital. CBEI worked with the Navy Yard Electric Utility (NYEU) to design and pilot an on-bill financing program. In this program, financing is provided for a building energy retrofit on TNY and the financing is paid back through regular monthly electricity bills. Unlike most on-bill programs, the NYEU program will incentivize deep energy retrofits taking advantage of a wide variety of energy savings measures, including renewables and combined heat and power. CBEI developed a case study usable by municipalities or other microgrid energy managers to incentivize deep energy efficiency retrofits and has distributed the case study to multiple microgrid energy managers and nonprofits with substantial membership reach.

Corner Grocery Store Energy Project — Philadelphia, PA: Results from these stores, “…are valuable to the Office of the Small Business Advocate, because they offer data supported technical solutions that may increase kW and kWh savings projects achieved through Act 129 small business direct install energy efficiency programs” — John Evans, PA PUC Office of the Small Business Advocate