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.
Four BRT case studies have been updated: Parmenter’s Las Colinas, GSA’s Courthouse Annex and LBJ Education building (two in one combined document) and Georgia Tech’s TSRB. The case studies are also posted in the BRT training materials fileshare for use by BOMA and APPA. Additional content for the training from the case studies and material from CBEI’s building 661 have been added to the training modules.
CBEI conducted research to develop and demonstrate a library of diagnostics decision support tools that can enable cost effective diagnostics solutions for existing buildings. This report describes early results in successfully developing and demonstrating the effectiveness of diagnostics and decision support tools for subsystem diagnostics (RTU, DX, AHU-VAV and building envelope subsystems) and fault prioritization.
Building 661 (B661) was intended is to be the CBEI Headquarters and was designed to encourage collaboration, and to serve as a catalyst to demonstrate energy efficient retrofit innovations, advocacy, practice and commercialization strategies to radically reduce energy use in the existing commercial/institutional building stock. These case studies review the design, construction and initial operation of the building.
During BP5, CBEI worked with NREL and ICF to support the DOE Energy Data Accelerator (EDA). CBEI focused on the stakeholder engagement and communication strategy. The responsibilities involved collecting feedback from municipalities and utilities regarding their success and experience with data aggregation and access strategies. CBEI also assisted the EDA program with the regional aspect of the exit strategy at the end of the Accelerator.
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.
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.
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.
The strategic focus of CBEI is on full-spectrum retrofit of existing average size commercial and multi-family residential buildings. This report reviews the integrated design process for the CBEI headquarters building.
A key objective of the EEB Hub is to provide successful demonstrations of integrated building design methods that lead to deep, reliable cuts in energy use while improving overall asset value overall in real estate markets.
This study is focused on simulation-based performance assessment of a number of electric lighting system design scenarios aiming to get energy savings with increased system efficiency coupled to daylight-linked controls while preserving visual comfort conditions for indoor spaces.