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This Fact Sheet provides an overview of the Better Buildings Workforce Guidelines project. The Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) are working with industry stakeholders to develop voluntary national guidelines that will improve the quality and consistency of commercial building workforce training and certification programs for five key energy-related jobs.

Few third-party guidance documents or tools are available for evaluating thermal energy storage (TES) integrated with packaged air conditioning (AC), as this type of TES is relatively new compared to TES integrated with chillers or hot water systems. To address this gap, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory conducted a project to improve the ability of potential technology adopters to evaluate TES technologies. Major project outcomes included: development of an evaluation framework to describe key metrics, methodologies, and issues to consider when assessing the performance of TES systems integrated with packaged AC; application of multiple concepts from the evaluation framework to analyze performance data from four demonstration sites; and production of a new simulation capability that enables modeling of TES integrated with packaged AC in EnergyPlus. This report includes the evaluation framework and analysis results from the project.

The rooftop unit (RTU) Field Evaluation Checklist is intended to help identify damage, dysfunction, or degradation that requires more than routine maintenance. The checklist should be used to conduct a visual-based field evaluation to further refine the preliminary analysis.

The rooftop unit inventory spreadsheet can be used to gather basic RTU information, such as number, size, age, and general condition. The detailed fields in the spreadsheet can be used to gather additional information, such as controls, usage patterns, and features for additional analysis of the RTUs identified for retrofit, replacement, or further analysis.

The rooftop unit (RTU) decision tree can be used for preliminary screening for replacement of RTU units with more efficient units. This decision tree organizes RTUs into bins for “retrofit,” “replacement,” “no action,” or “needs further analysis.”

OpenStudio development efforts have been focused on providing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) where users are able to extend OpenStudio without the need to compile the open source libraries. This paper will discuss the basic purposes and functionalities of the core libraries that have been wrapped with APIs including the Building Model, Results Processing, Advanced Analysis, Uncertainty Quantification, and Data Interoperability through Translators. Several building energy modeling applications have been produced using OpenStudio's API and Software Development Kits (SDK) including the United States Department of Energy's Asset ScoreCalculator, a mobile-based audit tool, an energy design assistance reporting protocol, and a portfolio scale incentive optimization analysis methodology. Each of these software applications will be discussed briefly and will describe how the APIs were leveraged for various uses including high-level modeling, data transformations from detailed building audits, error checking/quality assurance of models, and use of high-performance computing for mass simulations.

This paper will discuss the Building Agent™ platform, which has been developed and deployed in a campus setting at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The Building Agent™ provides aggregated and coherent access to building data, including electric energy, thermal energy, temperatures, humidity, and lighting levels, and occupant feedback, which are displayed in various manners for visitors, building occupants, facility managers, and researchers. This paper focuses on the development of visualizations for facility managers, or an energy performance assurance role, where metered data are used to generate models that provide live predicted ranges of building performance by end use.

A prescriptive approach to re-tuning small to medium sized commercial buildings including how to understand and collect necessary building information.

This is chapter 2 of 3. The full training can be found at http://buildingretuning.pnnl.gov/small_bldg_training.stm

This dynamic document provides background information to any potential audience of building re-tuning training. This document provides background information specifically geared toward small- to medium-sized commercial building operations. It introduces basic building energy terminology associated with building energy use to “prime” targeted participants to get the most out of the building re-tuning training. The intent is for participants who are less familiar with the concepts to review this material before taking the building re-tuning training class.

The primary audience for this instructor manual is the person who will be teaching the re-tuning course. In addition, community college instructors, retro-commissioning training providers and building operator training providers may find value in the material presented in this instructor manual as well. The purpose of this course is to help building operations staff to learn how to operate buildings more efficiently, reduce operating cost and provide energy savings. The knowledge and skills learned through the training will be highly valued by organizations and companies seeking to improve the performance of their buildings. Provides additional information on what to highlight in each of the small building re-tuning slides.