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This report presents a set of 15 best practices for owners, designers, and construction teams to reach high-performance goals and maintain a competitive budget. These best practices are based on the recent experiences of the Research Support Facility owner and design-build team for the Research Support Facility (RSF) on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) campus in Golden, Colorado, and show that achieving this high performance outcomes requires that all key integrated team members understand their opportunities to control capital costs.

This presentation Session I from the RSF Workshop discusses the unique energy efficiency features and performance of the Research Support Facility.

This presentation from Session III from the RSF Workshop discusses the cost considerations associated with designing, building, and operating the Research Support Facility.

The presentation from Session IV from the RSF Workshop discusses the impacts of occupant behavior on energy efficiency in the Research Support Facility. It also describes occupants' issues and concerns.

An energy-efficient data center includes targets for its power usage effectiveness (<1.2) and energy resource efficiency (< 0.9). It should be designed with hot isle–cold isle separation, use free cooling (economizer) and evaporative cooling when available, minimize fan energy, and use the most energy-efficient equipment possible.

This guide provides design teams with best practices for parking structure energy efficiency in the form of goals for each design aspect that affects energy use.

This presentation Session II from the RSF Workshop discusses the performance-based design-build process, which was used to procure and construct the Research Support Facility.

The Advanced Energy Retrofit Guide for Grocery Stores was created to help grocery store 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 General Service Administration's (GSA) Green Proving Ground (GPG) program worked with a team from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to identify buildings with office setups and equipment distributions typical of the wider GSA building stock. Eight buildings from GSA’s Mid-Atlantic Region, where plug loads average 21%, were selected. In each building, approximately 12 standard power strips with no control capability (the incumbent technology) were replaced with APSs, which monitored and provided power to an array of devices. More than 295 devices were monitored during the study, which consisted of three separate test periods, each four weeks in length. All buildings selected had workstation power management in place.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy's Building Technologies Program (BTP) evaluated a number of control strategies that can be implemented in a controller, to improve the operational efficiency of the packaged air conditioning units. The two primary objectives of this research project are: 1) determine the magnitude of energy savings achievable by retrofitting existing packaged air conditioning units with advanced control strategies not ordinarily used for packaged units and 2) estimating what the installed cost of a replacement control with the desired features should be in various regions of the U.S. This document reports results of the study.