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 purpose of this Integrated Technology Research Roadmap is to support the transformation of commercial / institutional / multi-family building energy efficiency retrofits by providing robust field-verified models and scalable, tested, integrated technology solutions to existing GPIC building stock. Furthermore, the goal of this Roadmap is to demonstrate, in the Philadelphia region, operational energy savings of 50 percent in the 2013-2020 timeframe in a scalable manner across a broad range of building types, while providing good indoor environment.
This report investigates developing sky radiative models for the Modelica systems programming language and compare those results to sky radiative models used in current simulation tools such as TRNSYS and Matlab. TRNSYS and Matlab softwares are commercially available, and have been used extensively to implement sky radiative algorithms linked with component-based building simulations and control implementations. While the softwares do require nancial investments to access the simulation tools,the highly modular components are adaptable to new modeling improvements that emerge in the literature.
This report explains the design and performance of demonstration of BIPV Systems for Bldg. 661. The results shows that very few surfaces on Building 661 that have an unrestricted, clear view of the sky for an adequate amount of incident solar irradiation for use in energy conversion systems.
The purpose of this document is to describe the technical investigation performed by the IBM team regarding the pros and cons of the BIMserver (Open source Building Information Modelserver or BiMserver, aka BIMserver.org) in the context of the requirements of the GPIC BIM/BEM (Building Information Modeling/ Building Energy Modeling) Server and Data Hub. BIMserver is a joint effort by Netherlands organization for applied scientific research (TNO), Technical University Eindhoven, VTT (Finland), CSIRO (Australia), AEC3 (Germany, Great Britain), Initiatiefgroep Open, Standaarden (Netherlands), and a growing group of others.
This report summarizes the findings from a review of a wide range of lighting software tools with a focus on the modeling capabilities of these programs, and in particular the capabilities of these programs in the area of daylighting analysis.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded $455,000 to the Energy Efficient Buildings Hub (EEB Hub) and several of its members to train building operators in the commercial, industrial and educational sectors so that they can more efficiently and economically operate their facilities. The award helps boost the EEB Hub’s objective to inform, train and educate people about proven energy-saving strategies and technologies towards the goal of reducing energy use in the Greater Philadelphia commercial building sector by 20 percent by 2020.
The broad goal of the GPIC Education and Workforce task is to ensure a skilled workforce at all levels in the energy efficient buildings sector in Greater Philadelphia. One of the first steps under the education task was to conduct a skills gap analysis to articulate the education and training needs of the market. It became clear, however, that the occupational classifications relating to the GPIC Hub — and the commercial EEB retrofit market — had not been clearly defined and, therefore, that the specific skill sets or competencies for jobs within a classification scheme could not be adequately articulated.
This report contains some general findings of a series of daylight models that was conducted for Building 661 with its existing fenestration systems and with a few small modifications that were made to these systems.
A key objective of GPIC is to design more impactful policies that will affect the market uptake of energy efficient solutions that conform to the overall goal of the GPIC Hub. As such, a macromodeling effort was undertaken to analyze and forecast the regional impact of policies and programs that might be put forward by GPIC’s Policy, Market, and Behavior (PMB) and crosstask researchers. A Policy and Market Macro-Modeling collaborative working group was formed under PMB to create analytical methods and tools to quantify the effects of policies on the adoption of energy conservation measures in commercial buildings. This report describes the methodology developed by the Policy and Market Macro-Modeling working group.
On October 20, 2011 more than 60 educators and industry representatives came together in Building 101 at the Navy Yard to forge connections, discuss the state of the energy efficient building industry is today, what role educational institutions can play to help drive the market, and how to bridge the transition. This meeting was intended to begin discussions among regional educators, GPIC, and business leaders around the goals of GPIC.
The purpose of this workshop was to bring together representatives from all of the tasks and from industry to develop a common understanding of Integration for GPIC, particularly as it relates to the lifecycle of a facility. The goal of this workshop was to develop the essential activities and interrelationship of tasks for the GPIC Energy Efficient Building Hub as they relate to the lifecycle of a building from planning through to operations.
To avoid unnecessary investments in transmission and generation resources, a good solution is to apply Demand Response programs to reduce the demand for electricity at peak hours, when generating electricity is more costly. Customers do not see how the electricity prices change on the real-time market, since most of them pay a flat rate based on the average price of electricity, therefore Demand Response programs can offer incentives to consumers to reduce their usage at peak hours, through rebates or as a response to higher electricity prices.
The goal of this study is to identify the primary policy and legal-related process factors in the Greater Philadelphia Area that foster or impede the retrofitting of commercial buildings to improve energy efficiency (“EE”).2 For the purpose of this study, policy factors include the structure of government, specific laws and regulations, government funded or mandated incentives and other financing mechanisms. Processes include legal-related factors that impact EE construction transactions, like contracts, public bidding process, accounting, etc.
This study identified the most significant policy and legal-related process factors effecting energy efficiency in commercial buildings in the Greater Philadelphia area.
Enhancements to the open-source Daysim daylight analysis software that permit users to model a photosensor control system as it will perform in a real space, considering the directional sensitivity of the photosensor, its mounting position, the space and daylight aperture geometry, window shading configuration; the electric lighting equipment and control zones; exterior obstructions; and site weather conditions.