Building Energy Resilience

As an industry, we provide building operators with efficient heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems as well as powerful building management control systems. Then we expect the operators to run the high-tech HVAC equipment efficiently.

There are many opportunities to improve computer datacenter energy performance, whether you’re operating a small server closet, or a large datacenter in a Fortune 1,000 company. But the key to tackling energy use in datacenters is measuring and tracking energy performance over time. Relevant measurement of energy performance over time is feasible now, but that has not always been the case.

Anyone involved in the Measurement and Verification (M&V) of building energy savings has encountered Stratified Random Sampling (SRS), a statistical tool used to handle the huge volume of data from the large number of projects and measures in a typical building energy research effort. From calibrated energy modeling to program evaluation and from the field through to the whitepaper, the use of applied statistical principles will simplify and improve the accuracy and defensibility of your M+V work.

Understanding Commissioning

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

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.

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.)

We often hear a question that goes something like this from building owners: “Why do I need an independent design review? I hire the best architects and engineers.” It’s a reasonable question — asked so often in my opinion because those of us in the architecture, engineering and construction industries have done such a poor job answering.