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This fact sheet summarizes recommendations for designing elementary, middle, and high school buildings that will result in 50% less energy use than conventional new schools built to minimum code requirements. The recommendations are drawn from the Advanced Energy Design Guide for K-12 School Buildings, an ASHRAE publication that provides comprehensive recommendations for designing low-energy-use school buildings.

Designed as a stand-alone document, this fact sheet provides key principles and a set of prescriptive design recommendations appropriate for smaller schools with insufficient budgets to fully implement best practices for integrated design and optimized performance. The recommendations have undergone a thorough analysis and review process through ASHRAE, and have been deemed an easily replicable combination of measures to achieve 50% savings in K-12 schools.

This fact sheet summarizes recommendations for designing new office buildings that result in 50% less energy use than conventional designs meeting minimum code requirements. The recommendations are drawn from the Advanced Energy Design Guide for Small to Medium Office Buildings, an ASHRAE publication that provides comprehensive recommendations for designing low-energy-use office buildings with gross floor areas up to 100,000 ft2.

Designed as a stand-alone document, this fact sheet provides key principles and a set of prescriptive design recommendations appropriate for smaller
office buildings with insufficient budgets to fully implement best practices for integrated design and optimized performance. The recommendations have undergone a thorough analysis and review process through ASHRAE, and have been deemed an easily replicable combination of measures to achieve 50% savings in the greatest number of office buildings.

"Education for Sustainability (EfS) empowers students to make decisions that balance the need to preserve healthy ecosystems with the need to promote vibrant economies and equitable social systems for all generations to come. Through a variety of EfS approaches, schools across the country and at all grade levels are currently satisfying curricular and achievement requirements and providing learning experiences that prepare students for the world they will inherit."

"Zero Net Energy (ZNE) is the future, and in a growing number of places the present, of building design and energy policy. A growing strategy to get to ZNE is to separate the building’s heating/cooling from the ventilation/dehumidification. Design firms and owners are striving to meet heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) loads with optimum comfort and minimal energy. Radiant systems can provide heating and cooling through pipes while ventilation and any humidity control requirements are efficiently met by a Dedicated Outdoor Air System (DOAS). This guide provides an overview of Radiant Heating and Cooling + DOAS systems."

"When designers of the first net zero energy school in the U.S. considered how they would approach the lighting design differently using today’s LED technology, the results extended far beyond just switching out the lightbulbs. The hypothetical redesign of Richardsville (Ky.) Elementary classrooms involves rethinking the daylighting design based on the evolution of LED lighting and the cheaper cost of photovoltaics (PV)."

Presentation at CxEnergy 2014 conference by Hanson, Inc. the commissioning agent for Sandy Grove Middle School. Sandy Grove, in Lumber Bridge, NC, is the first Zero Energy school built with a public-private partnership in the U.S.. Presentation includes technologies used, benefits of Zero Energy, common issues with the technologies they used, and lessons learned.

A recast of a presentation done for the Fairfax Chapter of Association of Energy Engineers in November of 2013. Presentation focuses on the the Advanced Energy Design Guides published by ASHRAE with association of AIA, USGBC, and IES with funding and technical support from DOE, NREL, and PNNL. In addition, the DOE Advanced Retrofit Guides are also discussed. Both sets of guides are available for download from this resource database.