The presentations, news, research summaries, reports, and technology overviews are collected here by focus area and represent the body of work developed by the CBEI partners during the 5-year project period. For additional information on market challenges, approach, and impacts, see each focus area overview.
This report is the pdf version of the CBEI Final report and results.
Whole building energy models do not always provide satisfactory predictions to facilitate decision making during design, due to large number of uncertainties in model input parameters. CBEI presents a computationally e?cient process for uncertainty quanti?cation, sensitivity analysis and automated calibration of building models. This is demonstrated using an energy simulation model of a medium sized o?ce building.
CBEI conducted an analysis of the interconnectedness of investment, technology, behavior, and governance to the energy system for the Alliance Commission on National Energy Efficiency Policy.
CBEI facilitated integrated visioning, expert workshops and design charrettes for Building 661, which contributed to the development of a report on enclosure technologies with an emphasis on engaging the building systems and systems integration critical to high performance retrofits. The report is focused on typical (older) small commercial buildings.
There is a growing body of literature on the effects of load shedding in controlling energy demand and supply, but there is virtually no research on the behavioral effects this practice may have on building occupants. This report describes the methods and results of an interrupted time series quasi-experiment used to try to capture these results.
In 2015-16 United Technologies Research Center (UTRC), in collaboration with the CBEI, developed OpenStudio measures for seven systems/components used in HVAC retrofit packages identified with high energy saving potentials in BP4 for small office, medium office, stand-alone retail, and primary school buildings in certain climate zones.
Fact Sheet on OpenStudio Enhancements
This research investigates opportunities for improving building performance and occupant satisfaction through an iterative process of empirical fieldwork in green buildings and computer simulation modeling. This project demonstrates that the simulation-modeling framework is feasible and useful. Additionally, this project has generated a variety of important empirical insights about how the usability of building-level green features and social and organizational factors affect occupant and operator behavior.
This paper presents the implementation and experimental demonstration results of a practically effective and computationally efficient model predictive control (MPC) algorithm used to optimize the energy use of the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system in a multi-zone medium-sized commercial building.
HVAC package solutions were identified that met the stated objectives, based on 6 building types (quick service restaurant, full service restaurant, small hotel. large hotel, supermarket, and convenience store) in 6 region/climate zone combinations.
CBEI developed a web-based integrated design decision support tool which utilizes energy performance data generated through coupling of whole building energy simulation models with systematic search procedures and advanced data analysis techniques. This coupling process was extended with the introduction of a simulation-based numerical optimization framework for the minimization of life cycle costs for building enclosure materials and operational energy consumption for office retrofit cases. This integrated optimization program is highly automated (thereby saving user effort) and utilizes non-commercial, open-source and readily extensible existing toolkits.
This report summarized an analysis of ten multifamily buildings for the cost of deep energy retrofits, without including power generation.
The paper presents a detailed study on the influence of building envelope upon the building’s life cycle performance and optimizes the design of the building envelope con-figurations, based on the detailed results obtained from a computational framework in which the whole-building energy simulation program of EnergyPlus v6.0 is coupled with GenOpt v3.0 generic optimization tool.
CBEI developed and demonstrated a set of tools and approaches for generating and implementing building-specific control algorithms that minimize energy consumption and energy costs while maintaining occupant comfort. The general approach involves the use of model-based predictive control (MPC) with reduced-order models and inverse (data-driven) models for the building envelope, indoor environment, and plant.
CBEI performed a major retrofit of their headquarters. This report provides early lessons learned from the integrated design process.