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.
The question, addressed by this project, is how to cost effectively save space conditioning energy and dollars in buildings with ducted constant air supply systems, particularly since many of these older central city buildings are 50% or less occupied. The problem for these older systems is how to design a low cost VAV system.
CBEI researchers worked with a local HVAC contractor to test a unique approach to this problem and determine the energy performance of a potential low cost option.
CBEI research has demonstrated through simulation that, for selected building types over a range of climate zones, HVAC package solutions exist that have the potential to provide at least 50% HVAC energy savings with a simple payback of 4 years or less.
Brokers are in a unique position to help their clients understand the potential impacts of energy efficiency. This fact sheet provides an overview of why broker training is valuable.
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.
A novel algorithm was tested against a large and diversified dataset comprising points from five buildings, two vendors, three distributors and more than 20K points. Overall the algorithm identifies about 90% of VAVs and 80% of AHUs and reaches an accuracy of about 90% in detecting the points required by a test application. The algorithm was incorporated into a VOLTTRON ready utility.
A fault detection and diagnostics system for rooftop air conditioners was developed using low-cost electronics. The system was designed to be compatible with the VOLTTRONTM platform. The underlying fault detection and diagnostics methodology utilizes virtual sensors to measure parts of the equipment operation that are sensitive to common faults. Using virtual sensors reduces costs while also providing accurate and reliable diagnostics.
This project implemented, validated and documented an automated system for training virtual refrigerant charge sensors for rooftop unit ACs. The system automatically tunes empirical parameters of a virtual sensor for estimating the amount of refrigerant in a system. The engineering time and costs associated with calibrating a virtual sensor are reduced because of the automated testing in an open laboratory and the reduced number of tests.
This report provides a meta-analysis of econometric studies, as well as case studies that provides evidence on substantial price and rent premiums that are associated with sustainable buildings in the commercial sector.
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.
The CBEI Corner Grocery Store Project carried out small grocery store energy audits and analysis in the city of Philadelphia. It also analyzed and compared the small business Direct Install programs of utilities in the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York. The emphasis of this analysis was relevance to the small urban grocery store owner.
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.
This project developed new features for the DOE SEED platform including the import, storage, and management of data from multiple sources including smart meter interval data. These added tools enable large building portfolio owners to conduct comparative analyses of their portfolios against other portfolio owners, facilitating sharing and collaboration in addition to enabling executive and operational level analyses for actionable intelligence. The enhanced platform easily support energy benchmarking and disclosure initiatives, and can increase public awareness of energy consumption and resource conservation.
Utilities expressed the need to utilize existing and new resources to help them strategically focus their rebate program target areas and enrich their Energy Efficiency program initiatives. To address these needs CBEI developed new analytics for DSM programs (energy efficiency and demand response) based on benchmarking data to show the usability of benchmarking data for utilities. This report quantifies how these analytics helped to improve targeting rebate customers.