High-performance commercial building systems
This report summarizes key technical accomplishments resulting from the three year PIER-funded R&D program, ''High Performance Commercial Building Systems'' (HPCBS). The program targets the commercial building sector in California, an end-use sector that accounts for about one-third of all California electricity consumption and an even larger fraction of peak demand, at a cost of over $10B/year. Commercial buildings also have a major impact on occupant health, comfort and productivity. Building design and operations practices that influence energy use are deeply engrained in a fragmented, risk-averse industry that is slow to change. Although California's aggressive standards efforts have resulted in new buildings designed to use less energy than those constructed 20 years ago, the actual savings realized are still well below technical and economic potentials. The broad goal of this program is to develop and deploy a set of energy-saving technologies, strategies, and techniques, and improve processes for designing, commissioning, and operating commercial buildings, while improving health, comfort, and performance of occupants, all in a manner consistent with sound economic investment practices. Results are to be broadly applicable to the commercial sector for different building sizes and types, e.g. offices and schools, for different classes of ownership, both public and private, and for owner-occupied as well as speculative buildings. The program aims to facilitate significant electricity use savings in the California commercial sector by 2015, while assuring that these savings are affordable and promote high quality indoor environments. The five linked technical program elements contain 14 projects with 41 distinct R&D tasks. Collectively they form a comprehensive Research, Development, and Demonstration (RD&D) program with the potential to capture large savings in the commercial building sector, providing significant economic benefits to building owners and health and performance benefits to occupants. At the same time this program can strengthen the growing energy efficiency industry in California by providing new jobs and growth opportunities for companies providing the technology, systems, software, design, and building services to the commercial sector. The broad objectives across all five program elements were: (1) To develop and deploy an integrated set of tools and techniques to support the design and operation of energy-efficient commercial buildings; (2) To develop open software specifications for a building data model that will support the interoperability of these tools throughout the building life-cycle; (3) To create new technology options (hardware and controls) for substantially reducing controllable lighting, envelope, and cooling loads in buildings; (4) To create and implement a new generation of diagnostic techniques so that commissioning and efficient building operations can be accomplished reliably and cost effectively and provide sustained energy savings; (5) To enhance the health, comfort and performance of building occupants. (6) To provide the information technology infrastructure for owners to minimize their energy costs and manage their energy information in a manner that creates added value for their buildings as the commercial sector transitions to an era of deregulated utility markets, distributed generation, and changing business practices. Our ultimate goal is for our R&D effort to have measurable market impact. This requires that the research tasks be carried out with a variety of connections to key market actors or trends so that they are recognized as relevant and useful and can be adopted by expected users. While some of this activity is directly integrated into our research tasks, the handoff from ''market-connected R&D'' to ''field deployment'' is still an art as well as a science and in many areas requires resources and a timeframe well beyond the scope of this PIER research program. The TAGs, PAC and other industry partners have assisted directly in this effort by reviewing and critiquing work to date, and by partnering in activities that advance results toward market impacts. The goals, objectives and key accomplishments of each technical program element and projects are described in the sections that follow. For each project we then summarize the Task Approach, the Outcomes of each task, and our Conclusions and Recommendations. We also provide a list and short summary of each significant research product e.g. report, prototype, software, standard, etc.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- California Energy Commission, Contract 400-99-012 (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC03-76SF00098
- OSTI ID:
- 821762
- Report Number(s):
- LBNL-53538; R&D Project: 80FJ01.; TRN: US200411%%712
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 1 Oct 2003
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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