@article {29854, title = {Small and Medium Building Efficiency Toolkit and Community Demonstration Program}, year = {2017}, month = {03/2017}, abstract = {

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{\textquoteright}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.

}, keywords = {CBES, commercial buildings, energy efficiency, energy modeling, energy savings, indoor air quality, indoor environmental quality, outdoor air measurement technology, outdoor airflow intake rate, retrofit, ventilation rate}, doi = {10.7941/S93P70}, author = {Mary Ann Piette and Tianzhen Hong and William J. Fisk and Norman Bourassa and Wanyu R. Chan and Yixing Chen and H.Y. Iris Cheung and Toshifumi Hotchi and Margarita Kloss and Sang Hoon Lee and Phillip N. Price and Oren Schetrit and Kaiyu Sun and Sarah C. Taylor-Lange and Rongpeng Zhang} } @article {60932, title = {Green, Clean, \& Mean: Pushing the Energy Envelope in Tech Industry Buildings}, year = {2015}, month = {05/2015}, publisher = {Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory}, abstract = {

When it comes to innovation in energy and building performance, one can expect leading-edge activity from the technology sector. As front-line innovators in design, materials science, and information management, developing and operating high-performance buildings is a natural extension of their core business.

The energy choices made by technology companies have broad importance given their influence on society at large as well as the extent of their own energy footprint. Microsoft, for example, has approximately 250 facilities around the world (30 million square feet of floor area), with significant aggregate energy use of approximately 4 million kilowatt-hours per day.

There is a degree of existing documentation of efforts to design, build, and operate facilities in the technology sector. However, the material is fragmented and typically looks only at a single company, or discrete projects within a company.Yet, there is no single resource for corporate planners and decision makers that takes stock of the opportunities and documents sector-specific case studies in a structured manner. This report seeks to fill that gap, doing so through a combination of generalized technology assessments ({\textquotedblleft}Key Strategies{\textquotedblright}) and case studies ({\textquotedblleft}Flagship Projects{\textquotedblright}).

}, author = {Evan Mills and Jessica Granderson and Wanyu R. Chan and Richard C. Diamond and Philip Haves and Bruce Nordman and Paul A. Mathew and Mary Ann Piette and Gerald Robinson and Stephen E. Selkowitz} }