Building Energy Resilience

When it comes to enjoying the many positive features of an enclosed parking garage, most users will not think about the type of ventilation system in place. But an enclosed parking garage poses an issue with carbon monoxide (CO), a very harmful toxic gas that is created when “fuels burn incompletely – most vehicles have an internal combustion engine where this occurs”[1]. Known as a “silent killer,” CO has no odor or color, but can very quickly poison a person before they even sense anything is wrong. Because of this risk, it’s especially important to make sure there is a proper ventilation system in any enclosed area where there is a potential for formation of CO. In this blog post, I will discuss the pros and cons of two current system designs that are typically used. When an engineer designs a ventilation system for an enclosed garage, they carefully calculate how much CFM is required based on square footage and quantity of operating vehicles. Depending on climate and location, the applicable standard/code for ventilation must be carefully followed to ensure the minimum requirements are met.

Energy efficiency is a tremendous opportunity that we are squandering at the federal level. While many states have adopted aggressive energy savings goals and have committed the necessary resources to advance both policy and practice toward meeting those goals, little federal action has been taken to advance building and transportation efficiency. The ACEEE’s 2014 International Energy Efficiency Score Card ranks the US near the bottom of industrialized economies in efficiency. The countries that are doing worse than we are include Russia, Brazil and Mexico.

In a recent blog post, “The Benefits of an ASHRAE Level 1 Energy Audit,” I discussed the process of performing an ASHRAE Level 1 energy audit, which is the first step in the LEED accreditation process for Existing Buildings (LEED EB). The Level 1 report is used to determine whether there is enough energy saving opportunities to proceed with LEED EB accreditation. In order to receive an energy credit in the official LEED EB application, however, an ASHRAE Level 2 energy audit is required. The Level 2 audit uses energy surveying and an engineering analysis to provide an even more detailed breakdown of how a building is performing; going deeper into the analysis of the Level 1 measures and identifying additional measures to improve the efficiency and functionality of the building. The Level 2 report details the opportunities to such a degree that actual decisions on implementation can be made and the LEED EB credit can be realized.

Part 1: Performance Improvement and Proven Energy Savings

I recently presented at the NCBC conference in Hartford, Connecticut on the lessons we have learned from our retrocommissioning work. Retrocommissioning is a difficult process to predict, as existing systems and opportunities vary so widely depending on the equipment’s age and functional state, as well as the changes in loads since the building’s design. So while projects themselves differ in scope, size and outcome, the lessons we’ve learned about the process apply across the board. In this two-part blog post, I will discuss our experience with the performance improvements (proven benefits to the building) this week and my thoughts on the process next time.

Introduction

End users of a building want to inhabit a space that provides, among other things, a comfortable environment with respect to ventilation and thermal comfort. Thermal comfort is typically comprised of two things: temperature and moisture content (aka relative humidity). Ventilation comfort is derived from providing enough outdoor air to a space to satisfy peoples’ need for oxygen, and mitigate buildup of odors as well as other air borne irritants and contaminants. HVAC systems can easily achieve these goals while simultaneously being energy hogs and maintenance nightmares.

I’ve been blogging on and off about the challenges I’ve been facing as I seek to build a high performance home. At this point we are looking at cutting back on energy performance, or giving up all together and buying a run-of-the-mill performance house.

In May I attended (and presented at – more on that in another post) the National Building Commissioning Association’s annual conference in Hartford, Connecticut. It was my first time at this organization’s gathering and I was pleasantly surprised by a few turns in the commissioning field that I hadn’t expected - mainly the extensive focus on energy efficiency and energy analysis.

I have the good fortune to work on leading commercial and industrial energy efficiency programs in three states in the Northeast. Two of these states undertake rigorous measurement and verification (M&V) to ensure they are delivering the savings they are claiming. In all three cases the states and their program administrators (PAs) are running programs that are pushing the boundaries of energy efficiency as they continue to advance savings in mature markets that have been served by energy efficiency programs for decades. My firm also works to implement energy efficiency projects for our select group of highly committed clients. We find energy efficiency opportunities in new construction projects that include leading international architectural and engineering firms, in retro-commissioning (RCx) projects and in energy efficiency upgrade projects.

I came across Ben Franklin’s famous saying “A penny saved is a penny earned” and it got me thinking about energy saving. Just like a heat pump seems to make energy for free (which it doesn’t, but that’s another story), saving energy through energy efficiency is a cumulative principal that saves much more than the actual kW or gallon of fuel that you’re not using. Consider the generation, distribution and transmission costs of the energy itself. By the time the kW is available at your circuit breaker, you’ve already lost 65-70% of the energy potential of that lump of coal or gallon of crude oil.

We spent last Thanksgiving in the Philadelphia area with my wife’s family, as we typically do every year. Though it’s not our usual habit, on Black Friday we ventured out to the local Target Store to do some shopping. As I recall, our purpose was to stock up on snacks for our toddler for the trip back to Vermont--it definitely was not to do holiday shopping on the most notoriously crazy shopping day of the year! While the trip to Target was fairly mundane, unbeknownst to us, as we swiped our bank debit cards to pay at checkout, our card information became unsecure in a complex data breach orchestrated from half a world away, reportedly in Eastern Europe and Russia.