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Dynamic pricing electricity tariffs are now the default for large customers in California, and provide federal facilities new opportunities to cut their electricity bills and help them meet their energy savings mandates. This fact sheet will help California federal facilities take advantage of these opportunities through “rate-responsive building operation,” which involves designing load management strategies around a facility’s variable electricity rate, using measures that require little or no financial investment. Most facility types can reduce or shift some electric load during times when rates are higher. Facilities that can curtail with a 24-hour notice may be especially good candidates for dynamic pricing programs.

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.

Report by the National Institute of Building Sciences and the Green Sports Alliance looks at ways the nation’s sports venues can make an impact by reducing their energy and water use. The report considers the potential water and energy reductions the U.S. sports sector could make, and highlights the financial savings some leagues and teams are already seeing from putting such efficiency initiatives into place. The report looks at the progress already being made in the nation’s sports venues, challenges to widespread improvement and opportunities to move forward.

In 2016, a project team of representatives from the National Institute of Building Sciences and the Green Sports Alliance began working on this project with input from the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The team looked at the existing data; conducted workshops and webinars; launched an industry survey; and interviewed representatives from across the sports industry. More than 125 industry representatives participated in these activities, and an additional 20,000 stakeholders received information on the project. This report compiles that data and sets a path for future implementation.

Develop a simple document and Web-based information guidebook to help commercial building software developers, energy managers, and control companies implement strategies for commercial building energy analysis and performance monitoring. This project will use the following book as a model for the design of the handbook: Builder's Guide to Mixed Climates: Details for Design and Construction by Joseph W. Lstiburek. February 2001. Taunton Press. ISBN 156158388X.

This report documents outcomes of the effort to rebuild Greensburg, Kansas, a town devastated by tornado damage in 2007. Key strategies include a sustainable comprehensive master plan, an ordinance specifying LEED Platinum ratings and 42% energy savings for city-owned buildings, focus on integrated design processes, and linkage of renewable and energy efficiency technologies with business development.

These are the appendices to the report "Rebuilding Greensburg, Kansas, as a Model Green Community: A Case Study on NREL’s Technical Assistance to Greensburg June 2007 – May 2009".

This brochure describes Department of Energy and National Renewable Energy Laboratory technical assistance in Greensburg, Kansas after the devastation of a tornado.

The scorecard provides a spreadsheet template for collecting and tracking building data related to energy performance modeling.

This guide provides an overview of the different energy audit options available and information on how to select an energy auditor.