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.
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.
This case study considers the strategy, program structure and financial alternatives for an On-Bill Financing program to be offered by The Navy Yard Electric Utility.
CBEI conducted modeling and demonstrations to evaluate multiple technologies, including air movement strategies, ultraviolet germicidal irradiation, hybrid ventilation and under floor air distribution, ventilation and shading systems, impact of roof color and roof insulation, lighting and shading controls and devices, high performance glazing, roof retrofit technologies, photosensor controlled electric lighting, and swirl diffusers.
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.
CBEI performed a major retrofit of their headquarters. This report provides early lessons learned from the integrated design process.
A CBEI team of researchers led by Jim Braun of Purdue University has successfully implemented the use of virtual sensors within a low-cost microprocessor.
A virtual sensor system (compatible with the VOLTTRON platform) has been designed and an initial
prototype has been tested.
The Pattern Matching Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based fault detection method developed by CBEI consistently detected faults at a detection rate of 94% with no false alarms.
The integrative design and delivery process includes establishing a new and different governance structure to guide a retrofit construction project, and a collaborative team that works together to make decisions for the design of the buildings.
Buildings consume over 40% of the total energy in the U.S. Over 90% of the buildings are less than 50,000 square feet in size. These buildings currently do not use building automation systems to monitor and control their building systems.
RTUs serve 60% of commercial floor space and account for about 150 Terawatt hours of annual electrical usage (~1.56 Quads of primary energy) and about $15B in electric bills in the US.