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 paper presents a systematic development process of whole-building energy models as performance benchmarks for retrofit projects. Statistical regression-based models and computational performance models require utility data for calibration and validation.
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.
Mesh generation is a critical and manually intensive step in CFD simulations in the architectural domain. This paper presents an approach to generate adaptive hexahedral-dominate meshes for CFD simulations in sustainable architectural design applications.
Resiliency is a growing concern for municipalities. This report explains how energy retrofits can align to community resiliency.
CBEI conducted an analysis of energy use in New York City commercial and multifamily buildings. This paper describes energy and building characteristics for the overall population of buildings and using model-based clustering methods, this paper then identifies key clusters of energy use and building characteristics in the multifamily sector.
The project has developed a business plan and revenue model for maintaining and sustaining the Certificate program after last budget period.
Medium office buildings in the Greater Philadelphia offer high potential to reduce building energy consumption. This study assesses the impact of a wide set of ECMs in combinations as retrofit packages, and which combinations offer the most energy conservation for a given investment.
This project worked with developers of DOE tools such as the Asset Score Tool and BuildingSync and developed outreach tools and engagements to accelerate and enhance utilization of these tools.
Policy implementers are interested in identifying the most effective ways to promote the use of benchmarking data in order to (a) add relevance to energy data in real estate transactions, and (b) increase investments into energy efficient building retrofits. This report provides feedback from representatives of more than 21 organizations operating in the Philadelphia, New York City, and regional or national markets on the benefits of public energy benchmarking data.
This report on Residential & Commercial Buildings is one of five research reports for the Alliance Commission on National Energy Efficiency Policy, which assesses the current state of efficiency within the economy and provides a review of the best local, state, and national practices.
The paper provides a survey of recent literature that highlights the influence of factors, such as social, cultural, environmental and regulatory, on electricity consumption behavior.
The paper provides a review of literature on the building occupant behavioral characteristics.
In 2008, Better Building Energy Data Accelerator partners Seattle and Puget Sound Energy (PSE) began the stakeholder engagement process to enable whole-building data access for multi-family and commercial building owners locally.
Between October 2008 and July 2014, Better Buildings EDA partners District of Columbia and Pepco successfully completed an extensive process of stakeholder engagement to enable whole building data access for multifamily, commercial, and federal building owners in their jurisdiction.
Between 2012 and 2015, Better Buildings Energy Data Accelerator partners Boston, Cambridge, and Eversource successfully completed an extensive process of stakeholder engagement to enable whole building data access for multi-family and commercial building owners in their jurisdiction.