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“Naval Support Activity Monterey identified how to reduce the
building’s electrical energy consumption by 27.9% and district
heating by 34.1%, all while saving more than 71,000 gallons of
wa-ter per year.”
Introduction
Commercial buildings in America represent 7% of the world’s total energy consumption and use roughly $134 billion in electricity, according to the Department of Energy’s Buildings Energy Data Book.
At the individual building scale, a 200,000-square-foot office building that pays $2 per square foot in energy costs annually can save tens of thousands of dollars of net operating income by reducing consumption modestly. And that doesn’t include the benefits of reducing greenhouse gases and increasing the comfort level of building inhabitants.
Energy audits can be an effective means of identifying energy conservation measures in existing buildings to improve efficiency and energy costs. Unfortunately, across the industry, there is a great deal of variation in how audit data is collected and analyzed, and the process is reliant on multiple transcription steps, unstandardized analyses, and tedious, error-prone data collection methods.
simuwatt™ Energy Audit is an innovative cloud-based software solution that lowers the time and cost of performing commercial building energy audits while preserving the data to facilitate portfolio-wide tracking, reporting, decision making, and reuse. Developed by concept3D in partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, it is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP).
Energy Audit Use Case
concept3D, Inc. 1100 Spruce Street, Suite 202 Boulder, Colorado
DoD Award and Support
As a part of the overall goal of reducing energy consumption in federal buildings by 30% by 2015, the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007 requires that federal agencies audit 25% of their 1.9 billion ft2 of covered facilities each year.
To improve energy efficiency while reducing energy auditing costs, the DoD supported the initial development of a level II and level III energy auditing software technology utilizing four proven components:
1. NREL’s energy auditing methodology, which includes workflow processes for conducting an audit and gathering/ reporting data.
2. concept3D’s mobile geometry capture software, which innovatively allows users to draw a 3D building as they walk through it or from imported architectural blueprints.
3. NREL’s Building Component Library (BCL), developed by concept3D, that warehouses reusable building components such as lighting, HVAC equipment and envelope materials that can be added to an audit in the field, as well as reusable measures for analysis of potential retrofit scenarios.
4. NREL’s OpenStudio energy modeling platform that was the primary analysis platform output supported by simuwatt. Data collected in the mobile application, along with BCL component data, are automatically exported into a working energy model for whole building analysis.
The DoD also secured demonstration sites for field-testing and collection of feedback for product refinement. Demonstrations were performed at of the following facilities sequentially:
• Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado • U.S. Army Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas
• U.S. Army Fort Jackson, Columbia, South Carolina • Tyndall Air Force Base, Panama City, Florida
• Naval Support Activity Monterey, Monterey, California
Naval Support Activity Monterey
The final demonstrations provided to the DoD were at the Naval Support Activity Monterey facilities in Monterey, California. These audits were unique in that they were performed in collaboration with a third party Energy Services Company (ESCO) to illustrate how an auditor might use the tool and leverage the feature-set that was developed. The representative auditor from this particular ESCO participated in a two-day training in advance of the site visit. Two buildings at the facility were selected for the demonstration to represent common commercial building use types and varying complexities of systems.
Facility #1
The first facility, a 15,000 sq.ft., 2-story building constructed in 1959, that had been converted from a barracks, had simple equipment, systems and operation schedules.
• Space Types: office, conference and bathroom.
• Heating: hot water baseboards energized by central plant steam.
• Cooling: no cooling system or ventilation system. Operable windows in use.
Using the software technology workflow, five energy conservation measures were identified for lighting, operations, plug loads, retro-commissioning and domestic water with payback periods ranging from under a year to 8.1 years. The combined measures had a simple payback period of 3.2 years, and the estimated cost of implementation of the project based on typical median pricing would
be $18,232.
The savings: Installation of these five measures would reduce the building’s electrical energy consumption by 27.9% and district heating by 34.1%, all while saving more than 71,000 gallons of water per year.
This demonstration showed the flexibility of the simuwatt Energy Auditor interface to audit small, simple buildings as well as capture both simple and non-traditional systems.
The small footprint allowed for a rapid audit with full space surveys that included HVAC systems, zoning, service water, plug loads, envelope, fenestrations, and lighting.
Repetition in space size, shape and use was easily audited by using features to reuse space attributes throughout the building. The staff left the site with an energy model ready for analysis using OpenStudio.
Facility #2
The second facility, a 75,000 sq.ft., 3-story building constructed in 1969, had a complex system and operation configuration as the building had changed uses many times through its life, and at the time of the audit served as an office space, training facility and data center.
• Space Types: office, conference, classrooms, auditorium, data center, break rooms, and storage areas.
concept3D, Inc. 1100 Spruce Street, Suite 202 Boulder, Colorado
• Heating: The core of the building is served by fan coil units. An air handling unit on the roof, with a hot water coil only, provides outside air to the building. The perimeter is served by fin-tubed radiation supplied by central plant steam.
• Cooling: The core of the building is served by fan coil units. A single water-cooled chiller with cooling tower, two air-cooled chillers, and data center CRAC units.
Using the software technology workflow, five energy conservation measures were identified for lighting, hot water pumps, and plug loads with payback periods ranging from 1.4 to 8.1 years. The combined measures had a simple payback of 3.7 years, and the estimated cost of implementation of the project is $74,199.
The savings: Installation of these five measures will reduce the building electrical energy consumption by 10.1 % and save $19,789 per year.
This building demonstrated the wide range of building use types and systems that can be audited using simuwatt Energy Auditor. The majority of the 75,000 sq.ft. space was surveyed and exported to an energy model in a single day. This was accomplished through defining electrical load attributes according to each of the space use types found in the building. These spaces were then leveraged along with a building control portal (PC) to define the zones of the building.
Building systems had been laid out in a very complex manner using separate unit level controls for each system. The software interface solved these complexities by providing the ability to input
equipment and controls as well as create multiple zones per floor and extend these zones above and below to multiple floors.
Captured Savings
The goal of the DoD project was to demonstrate a software workflow consisting of several existing energy auditing and
software technologies that could improve energy efficiency at DoD facilities while reducing energy auditing costs. The prototype was
demonstrated on multiple DoD sites by members of NREL and simuwatt, and it was used by a third party energy auditor with minimal training, proving a viable, standardized energy audit workflow.
typically procured by the DoD—without sacrificing audit quality.
In addition to savings captured during the initial audit, subsequent audits reusing the original audit data were estimated to reduce the cost by another 50%.
Lessons Learned and the Future of simuwatt
simuwatt identified product improvement opportunities through site visit activities with NREL, DoD partners, the contracted energy auditor, and other companies that serve the Federal and private markets. simuwatt has incorporated that feedback into its roadmap to improve the product offering by expanding its capabilities to serve a broader market of energy auditing use cases while maintaining a standardized data gathering and energy modeling approach.
Key areas of focus:
• A lighter weight application to support a broader range of iOS, Android, Windows, and Web devices including full size tablets, mini tablets, laptops, desktop computers and more. • A centralized project data source for multiple contributors to share project data, perform
team audits of the same facility or campus, track revision history, and reuse project data for future audits or other applications.
• Support level I to level III energy audits by offering export options to spreadsheet analysis while continuing to export to energy modeling platforms such as OpenStudio.
• Connect to other related technologies such as Energy Star Portfolio Manager to allow for reuse of data and further streamlining of the energy audit.
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concept3D, Inc. 1100 Spruce Street, Suite 202 Boulder, Colorado
