TY - RPRT T1 - Small and Medium Building Efficiency Toolkit and Community Demonstration Program Y1 - 2017 A1 - Mary Ann Piette A1 - Tianzhen Hong A1 - William J. Fisk A1 - Norman Bourassa A1 - Wanyu R. Chan A1 - Yixing Chen A1 - H.Y. Iris Cheung A1 - Toshifumi Hotchi A1 - Margarita Kloss A1 - Sang Hoon Lee A1 - Phillip N. Price A1 - Oren Schetrit A1 - Kaiyu Sun A1 - Sarah C. Taylor-Lange A1 - Rongpeng Zhang KW - CBES KW - commercial buildings KW - energy efficiency KW - energy modeling KW - energy savings KW - indoor air quality KW - indoor environmental quality KW - outdoor air measurement technology KW - outdoor airflow intake rate KW - retrofit KW - ventilation rate AB -

Small commercial buildings in the United States consume 47 percent of all primary energy consumed in the building sector. Retrofitting small and medium commercial buildings may pose a steep challenge for owners, as many lack the expertise and resources to identify and evaluate cost-effective energy retrofit strategies. To address this problem, this project developed the Commercial Building Energy Saver (CBES), an energy retrofit analysis toolkit that calculates the energy use of a building, identifies and evaluates retrofit measures based on energy savings, energy cost savings, and payback. The CBES Toolkit includes a web app for end users and the CBES Application Programming Interface for integrating CBES with other energy software tools. The toolkit provides a rich feature set, including the following:

  1. Energy Benchmarking providing an Energy Star score
  2. Load Shape Analysis to identify potential building operation improvements
  3. Preliminary Retrofit Analysis which uses a custom developed pre-simulated database
  4. Detailed Retrofit Analysis which utilizes real time EnergyPlus simulations

In a parallel effort the project team developed technologies to measure outdoor airflow rate; commercialization and use would avoid both excess energy use from over ventilation and poor indoor air quality resulting from under ventilation.

If CBES is adopted by California’s statewide small office and retail buildings, by 2030 the state can anticipate 1,587 gigawatt hours of electricity savings, 356 megawatts of non-coincident peak demand savings, 30.2 megatherms of natural gas savings, $227 million of energy-related cost savings, and reduction of emissions by 757,866 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. In addition, consultant costs will be reduced in the retrofit analysis process.

CBES contributes to the energy savings retrofit field by enabling a straightforward and uncomplicated decision-making process for small and medium business owners and leveraging different levels of assessment to match user background, preference, and data availability.

U2 - LBNL-2001054 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Commercial Building Energy Saver: An energy retrofit analysis toolkit JF - Applied Energy Y1 - 2015 A1 - Tianzhen Hong A1 - Mary Ann Piette A1 - Yixing Chen A1 - Sang Hoon Lee A1 - Sarah C. Taylor-Lange A1 - Rongpeng Zhang A1 - Kaiyu Sun A1 - Phillip N. Price KW - Building Technologies Department KW - Building Technology and Urban Systems Division KW - buildings KW - buildings energy efficiency KW - Commercial Building Systems KW - conservation measures KW - energy efficiency KW - energy use KW - energyplus KW - External KW - Retrofit Energy KW - simulation research AB -

Small commercial buildings in the United States consume 47% of the total primary energy of the buildings sector. Retrofitting small and medium commercial buildings poses a huge challenge for owners because they usually lack the expertise and resources to identify and evaluate cost-effective energy retrofit strategies. This paper presents the Commercial Building Energy Saver (CBES), an energy retrofit analysis toolkit, which calculates the energy use of a building, identifies and evaluates retrofit measures in terms of energy savings, energy cost savings and payback. The CBES Toolkit includes a web app (APP) for end users and the CBES Application Programming Interface (API) for integrating CBES with other energy software tools. The toolkit provides a rich set of features including: (1) Energy Benchmarking providing an Energy Star score, (2) Load Shape Analysis to identify potential building operation improvements, (3) Preliminary Retrofit Analysis which uses a custom developed pre-simulated database and, (4) Detailed Retrofit Analysis which utilizes real-time EnergyPlus simulations. CBES includes 100 configurable energy conservation measures (ECMs) that encompass IAQ, technical performance and cost data, for assessing 7 different prototype buildings in 16 climate zones in California and 6 vintages. A case study of a small office building demonstrates the use of the toolkit for retrofit analysis. The development of CBES provides a new contribution to the field by providing a straightforward and uncomplicated decision making process for small and medium business owners, leveraging different levels of assessment dependent upon user background, preference and data availability.

VL - 159 U2 - LBNL-1004502 ER -