Building Energy Resilience

Understanding Commissioning

I recently received an RFP for building commissioning services that included the following statements:

Renewable energy – wind and solar in particular – are all the rage these days. Companies are clamoring to be to be seen as “green” to feel good about their power sources and to market this image to the world. But what many don’t do first is the less glamorous and less visible step of reducing their need for energy by retrocommissioning and investing in energy efficiency. Why put in a large array of solar panels when a quarter of this load represents wasted building energy?

What is a ground source heat pump (GSHP)? A heat pump is an air conditioner that can cool in the summer and heat in the winter. The ground source part means that the heat removed from the building in the summer and the heat added to the building in the winter goes to and comes from the ground.

Sustainability – defined here as the responsible management of natural resources to create a more robust, independent and environmentally conscious organization – is a pursuit being explored by more and more companies. The challenge for many corporate leaders and managers is how to initiate change in their company’s culture. How do you create such a sea change authentically: something that won’t sound like a gimmick or start with a bang and fizzle out within a brief period of time? Over the years I have seen a pattern to the steps taken by clients who have been successful in creating a corporate culture of sustainability.

A coworker recently forwarded a link to a posting in the Environmental Leader by Kathy Miller, mentioning that it related to some of my blog posts. In How to Engage in Sustainability with Higher Purpose, Dr. Miller points out the importance of corporate vision to sustainability, and recognizes that engaging people increases their commitment to the business and its goals. These are recurring themes in my thinking.

Project-specific energy efficiency baselines, where the starting point for building efficiency is adjusted based on knowledge from our past successes, will become the norm as the energy efficiency market becomes more sophisticated. You read it here first.

Building control systems rely on the information provided to them by the various sensors throughout the building. Sensors for temperature, light level, carbon dioxide (CO2), and enthalpy (or total energy content of air) are just a few examples. If the critical sensors in a building are inaccurate (that is, significantly out of calibration), the building will not work efficiently, costs will increase and comfort issues will result. Let’s look at how to calibrate your building control sensors, what to calibrate, and a few examples of why control sensor calibration is so important.

One of the biggest challenges in conducting a building commissioning design review is to get the designer to seriously consider a design review suggestion. Designers will naturally be defensive, as would any of us. Having been an HVAC designer myself, I know one of the designer’s biggest fears is seeing comments that make the designer “look bad” to the client (building owner).

PETM, or the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, has been on my mind lately since Vermont is still recovering from the impacts of Hurricane Irene. While the direct impact of the storm was on relatively small numbers of people in a world of 7 billion humans, we in Vermont have a tight knit community. We feel each other’s pain.

Everyone is talking about building retrocommissioning – they just don’t know it. Retrocommissioning is the art of analyzing a building’s current performance and implementing measures to reduce the operating cost while improving the functionality of the building’s systems. (Commissioning is the term used to describe this process when it is applied to new buildings, so ‘retro-commissioning’ evolved as the term for when the building has been around a while.)