Advanced Search

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.

The lack of empirical data on the energy performance of buildings is a key barrier to accelerating the energy efficiency retrofit market. The DOE’s Buildings Performance Database (BPD) helps address this gap by allowing users to perform exploratory analyses on an anonymous dataset of hundreds of thousands of commercial and residential buildings. These analyses enable market actors to assess energy efficiency opportunities, forecast project performance, and quantify performance risk using empirical building data. In this paper, we describe the process of collecting and preparing data for the database, and present a peer-group analysis tool that allows users to analyze building performance for narrowly defined subsets of the database, or peer groups. We use this tool to explore a case study of a multifamily portfolio owner comparing his buildings’ performance to the peer group of multifamily buildings in the local metro area. We also present a performance comparison tool that uses statistical methods to estimate the expected change in energy performance due to changes in building-component technologies. We demonstrate a low-effort retrofit analysis, providing a probabilistic estimate of energy savings for a sample building retrofit. The key advantages of this approach compared to conventional engineering models are that it provides probabilistic risk analysis based on actual
measured data and can significantly reduce transaction costs for predicting savings across a portfolio.

With 7 hospitals and 22 physician locations serving more than 9 Wisconsin counties, ThedaCare has ample room to implement and reap the benefits of building efficiency measures. At the Appleton Medical Center, ThedaCare’s Lighting Energy Efficiency in Parking (LEEP) Campaign Award winning project involved replacing inefficient medium-wattage HID lighting fixtures at a 126,000 square foot parking structure with high efficiency low-wattage LED fixtures. The resulting energy savings exceed 80 percent of the previous usage. A 100-year old company and the third largest health care employer in Wisconsin, ThedaCare has now implemented LED exterior lighting throughout Appleton Medical Center.

The JBG Companies (JBG), an investor, owner, developer, and manager of real estate in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area, achieved almost 50% energy savings compared to energy code by using a combination of high efficiency LEDs coupled with lighting controls for the parking structure at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Shady Grove in Maryland. The NCI
parking structure was recognized by the Lighting Energy Efficiency in Parking (LEEP) Campaign for the Highest Percentage Energy Savings in a Single Parking Structure (New Construction)
and Highest Absolute Annual Energy Savings in a Single Parking Structure (New Construction). In addition to its 2014 LEEP Campaign Award, the buildings have also been recognized in 2011, 2013, and 2014 by both local Maryland organizations and national organizations.

This guide was created to help healthcare facility decision-makers plan, design, and implement energy improvement projects in their facilities. It was designed with energy managers in mind, and presents practical guidance for kick-starting the process and maintaining momentum throughout the project life cycle.

The purpose of this handbook is to furnish guidance for planning and conducting a highperformance building charrette, sometimes called a "greening charrette." The handbook answers typical questions such as, "What is a charrette?", "Why conduct a charrette?", "What topics should we cover?", "Whom should we invite?" and "What happens after the charrette?". Owners, design team leaders, site planners, state energy office staff, and others who believe a charrette will benefit their projects will find the handbook helpful.

This paper illustrates the challenges of integrating rigorous daylight and electric lighting simulation data with whole-building energy models, and defends the need for such integration in order to achieve aggressive energy savings in building designs. Through a case study example, we examine the ways daylighting – and daylighting simulation – drove the design of a large net-zero energy project.

It is still early in the collection and analysis of energy performance data, but it is already clear that high-performance commercial buildings—some "almost net-zero buildings"—can be constructed cost effectively, providing productive environments for occupants, reducing operating costs, and enhancing the competitiveness of commercial properties.

This paper describes how net-zero energy buildings will produce, during a typical year, enough renewable energy to offset the energy they consume from the grid.

This conference paper discusses four well-documented definitions of net-zero energy: net-zero site energy, net-zero source energy, net-zero energy costs, and net-zero energy emissions, along with pluses and minuses of each.