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Article in the Whole Building Design Guide about the uses and features of metal roofs that meet "cool roof" standards.

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.

Encouraging commercial building owners to set measurable energy goals before design begins can drive design and contractor teams to develop innovative energy efficiency solutions within conventional building budgets. The successes and lessons learned by a federal building owner's performance-based procurement project formed the basis of an expanded program using utilities as the outreach channel to replicate the approach. The utilities delivered incentive-based offerings to focus building owners on the whole building rather than on individual building components and systems. This 11-page paper documents the core principles, successes and lessons learned from these utility programs in different areas of the country.

When it comes to achieving significant sustainability gains, an international retail giant has unique opportunities to cut energy use. With a total of 4,500 sites, Walmart’s commitment to efficiency in parking lighting in new construction and retrofits is paying off in major savings.

As a result of its lighting upgrades Walmart received individual Lighting Energy Efficiency in Parking (LEEP) Campaign awards for a superstore, a neighborhood market and a Sam’s Club. Across 100 stores including both new and retrofitted sites, over 40 million square feet in surfaces for parking and over 100,000 parking spaces, Walmart is saving over 15 million kWh each year as a result of lighting upgrades.

One of the nation’s largest schools serving over 60,000 students, the University of Minnesota (U of M) is upgrading the lighting at all 18 parking ramps and garages on its Minneapolis campus. In the Northrop Auditorium Garage, a small 24,000 square foot facility with 75 parking spots, U of M replaced low-wattage high-pressure sodium fixtures with high efficiency, lower- wattage LED fixtures with lighting controls. This Lighting Energy Efficiency in Parking (LEEP) Campaign Award winning project achieved 90% energy savings by upgrading to LEDs with lighting controls.

NorthBay VacaValley Hospital completed lighting retrofits to their 150,000 square foot parking lot and its 225 parking spaces. They did so with help from The California Lighting Technology Center (CLTC) at the University of California, Davis. The project has achieved 65% savings and received a 2014 Lighting Energy Efficiency in Parking (LEEP) Campaign’s award for best use of lighting controls. In addition, the retrofits improved lighting maintenance operations and end-user satisfaction.

The lighting retrofit included replacing roughly 50 induction luminaires with new LED fixtures with embedded lighting controls.
The new LED fixtures were coupled with various kinds of lighting control systems, including a radio frequency (RF) connectivity control system that was installed in dedicated zones with passive- infrared (PIR) and long-range microwave sensors to achieve energy savings. An “ultra-smart” lighting control network was also put in place, giving facility managers the ability to adjust lighting schedules, light levels and time-out settings, monitor the system’s energy use, and receive automated alerts when luminaires require maintenance.

Power purchase agreement presentation for government buildings under the federal energy management program (FEMP).

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.

This multimedia toolkit is designed to guide energy efficiency program administrators through the process of planning, implementing and measuring a large-scale, deep retrofit energy efficiency program for small-to-medium businesses (SMB). We provide downloadable tools and forms you can adapt for use in your own program.

This guidebook is a reference to help other program sponsors and implementers develop and deliver a full-scale and comprehensive small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) energy efficiency program that can achieve similar results. The online SMART Scale Toolkit accompanies this guidebook.

A demonstration of the SMART Scale model in the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD) on over 700 projects indicates that an average whole building electricity savings of 20% from the baseline is possible while remaining cost-effective, with a cost of $0.0346 per lifetime kWh and an estimated total resource cost of 3.1. Previous generations of DI programs were capturing only 10% to 12% of whole building electricity savings through approaches dominated by lighting measures.