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.
There is a growing body of literature on the effects of load shedding in controlling energy demand and supply, but there is virtually no research on the behavioral effects this practice may have on building occupants. This report describes the methods and results of an interrupted time series quasi-experiment used to try to capture these results.
CBEI developed a market model for analyzing the potential for policies to improve the advanced energy retrofit market. This study analyzes the potential for disclosure, on-bill financing, energy service performance contracts, and feebates to influence the retrofit market in the Philadelphia region.
The report identifies 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. 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 energy efficiency construction transactions, like contracts, public bidding process, accounting, etc.
In 2015-16 United Technologies Research Center (UTRC), in collaboration with the CBEI, developed OpenStudio measures for seven systems/components used in HVAC retrofit packages identified with high energy saving potentials in BP4 for small office, medium office, stand-alone retail, and primary school buildings in certain climate zones.
Fact Sheet on OpenStudio Enhancements
This report focuses on how planning and zoning tools at the municipal level and public-private partnerships can increase uptake of energy retrofits.
This paper presents Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD) technologies, their on-line implementation, and results from several demonstrations conducted for a large-size HVAC system. The two technologies are executed at the supervisory level in a hierarchical control architecture as extensions of a baseline Building Management System (BMS). The MPC algorithm generates optimal set points for the HVAC actuator loops which minimize energy consumption while meeting equipment operational constraints and occupant comfort constraints.
The CBEI’s marketing engagement plan for the Certificate of Proficiency in Benchmarking Program consisted of personal outreach and social media outreach. The personal outreach included in person meetings, email, conference calls, and webinar meetings. Each meeting included a brief introduction of Certificate of Proficiency in Benchmarking Program and other online sources of information. A PowerPoint presentation and a survey were also created.
This research investigates opportunities for improving building performance and occupant satisfaction through an iterative process of empirical fieldwork in green buildings and computer simulation modeling. This project demonstrates that the simulation-modeling framework is feasible and useful. Additionally, this project has generated a variety of important empirical insights about how the usability of building-level green features and social and organizational factors affect occupant and operator behavior.
Intended for property owners, portfolio managers and government officials, the Intermediate and Advanced Level – A Guide to Community-Wide Benchmarking Analysis guides offer further approaches to understanding the movement of Energy Star Portfolio Manager scores and the relationship to specific fuel use types.
The objective of this project was to prepare a change of occupancy code change for the IECC (Section C505) and lay the groundwork for its eventual implementation. This code change and efforts to present it at various meetings of code officials are described in this report.
Field demonstrations provided test and evaluation data for virtual sensor based AFDD concepts and provided a laboratory demonstration on the VOLTTRON platform.
CBEI conducted a review of current federal historic preservation policies and their impact on energy efficiency retrofits.
This paper presents the implementation and experimental demonstration results of a practically effective and computationally efficient model predictive control (MPC) algorithm used to optimize the energy use of the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system in a multi-zone medium-sized commercial building.
HVAC package solutions were identified that met the stated objectives, based on 6 building types (quick service restaurant, full service restaurant, small hotel. large hotel, supermarket, and convenience store) in 6 region/climate zone combinations.