Advanced Search

Over the course of 5 years, NREL worked with commercial building owners and their design teams in the DOE Commercial Building Partnerships (CBP) to cut energy consumption by 50% in new construction (versus code) and by 30% in existing building pilot projects (versus code or pre-retrofit operational energy use depending on the preference of the Partner) using strategies that could be replicated across their building portfolios. A number of different building types were addressed, including supermarket, retail merchandise, combination big box (general merchandise and food sales), high rise office space, and warehouse. The projects began in pre-design and included a year of measurement data to evaluate performance against design expectations. Focused attention was required throughout the entire process to achieve a design with the potential to hit the energy performance target and to operate the resulting building to reach this potential. This paper will report quantitative results and cover both the technical and the human sides of CBP, including the elements that were required to succeed and where stumbling blocks were encountered. It will also address the impact of energy performance goals and intensive energy modeling on the design process innovations and best practices.

This roadmap presents a high-level approach to net zero energy building (NZEB) planning, design, construction, and operations, based on NREL’s firsthand experience procuring NZEBs, and based on NREL and other industry research on NZEB feasibility.

This project was part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Commercial Buildings Partnerships. Companies and organizations, selected through a competitive process, teamed with DOE, national laboratory staff, and technical experts from the private sector who provided technical expertise to explore energy-saving ideas and strategies that were applied to specific building projects and that could be replicated across the market. The work presented here focuses on reducing energy use in supermarkets.

NREL contracted with the Energy Center of Wisconsin to review the Commercial Building Partnerships projects and identify and compile the best practices for ten energy conservation measures that were tested in those projects. The resulting compilation is presented in this report.