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This guide explains the benefits and process of building commissioning thereby providing owners and other stakeholders a tool to improve building efficiency and operation. It is intended to be a resource, as well as a call to action, for building owners and facility managers who want to verify their buildings are not only operating as originally intended, but also as efficiently as possible. Commissioning of new construction and major renovations is the primary focus, although commissioning of existing buildings is also briefly discussed as well.

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

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.

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 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.

While the availability of “big data” about building energy performance is increasing in response to market demands and public policies, the lack of standard data formats is a significant ongoing barrier to its full utilization. To overcome this barrier, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) developed the Building Energy Data Exchange Specification (BEDES).

BEDES is designed to enable the exchange, comparison, and combination of empirical information by providing common terms and definitions for data about commercial and residential building’s physical and operational characteristics, energy use, and efficiency measures.

This paper describes the BEDES development process, scope, structure, and plans for implementation and ongoing updates.

This report outlines the technical protocol used to generate Department of Energy's Commercial Building Energy Asset Score for commercial buildings, explains the scoring methodology, and provides additional details regarding the Asset Scoring Tool. This report also describes alternative methods that were considered prior to developing the current approach. Finally, this report describes a few features of the program where alternative approaches are still under evaluation.

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 paper introduces a classification system for net-zero energy buildings (ZEB) based on the renewable sources a building uses.

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.