Colorado Real Estate Journal - September 2, 2015
As we advance toward a more energy-efficient built environment, building owners are seeking guidance on how to maximize the energy performance of their buildings. Many owners are concerned about the cost and effectiveness of the tools necessary to achieve this goal, but tools such as the Retrofit Savings Estimator help streamline the energy analysis process. The RSE is a common sense tool with a deep technical backbone that anyone can use to scope out deep energy retrofits for existing buildings. This innovation built on an established energy-modeling platform makes expert analyses accessible to building owners and design communities without requiring expertise in building energy models or performing data analytics. Owners can now weigh options and choose strategies to optimize energy savings, even if they don’t yet know how each component of their building contributes to the cost of operation. Anyone can target energy savings opportunities for individual buildings or help to select projects from a portfolio of buildings based on solid analytics. The RSE is a free, online resource offered by New Buildings Institute, a nonprofit organization working to improve the energy performance of commercial buildings. In researching and conceptualizing the RSE, NBI looked at reasons why building owners struggle to make efficiency investments. In many cases, owners are confronted with anecdotal claims about efficiency improvements that lack a reliable context for their building retrofit project. This intuitively raises doubts about where to begin. The RSE provides the missing context based on a simple description of the existing building, its location and its use. The RSE’s results are presented in ranked order showing energy improvement measures with the magnitude of each measure’s relative effectiveness. The tool is easy and customizable. There are 11 building types to choose from, including offices, retail, clinics, warehouses, supermarkets and schools. To get started, a user needs basic building data: total building area, type, year of construction and generalized type of heating and cooling equipment. There is no need to know numerical values or equipment specs. For any information that may be missing at the outset, there are built-in, reliable default assumptions. The underlying software uses context sensitive, field-verified algorithms developed during 20 years of modeling and consulting experience. These functions extend the basic building inputs and create standard, nonproprietary DOE-2 energy models in real time. The RSE identifies a set of the most impactful measures based on basic building characteristics and calculates potential energy savings associated with those upgrades. Hundreds of custom energy simulations examine the effect of alternative energy-saving measures, allowing users to consider how much energy can be saved by implementing individual or sets of energy-savings measures. The tool also expresses the percent of energy saved compared with current usage. Users can experiment with subsets of recommended measures to determine the impact of alternatives. Once users have scoped out their opportunities, they can print the results and use them to compare multiple buildings in a portfolio to prioritize retrofit opportunities, define the scope of potential projects and determine the savings potential from deep energy retrofit projects. There are two stages to the process. After entering basic information, data is sent via the Web to a server where 35 custom energy simulation models are evaluated in about a minute by The RSE software to test each specific building’s sensitivity to certain improvements. For example, if the potential energy impact of adding insulation to the roof is only 1 or 2 percent, the tool may ignore that measure in favor of strategies saving more energy. This first step means that you never have to answer questions that aren’t directly relevant to the most impactful retrofit strategies. After the first round of calculations, the RSE presents the second round of questions that focus on four to seven key measures with the highest potential value to the owner. The questions are at a level of detail that most building owners or managers can readily answer. These questions help the RSE refine the energy savings impacts of specific improvements. For example, if one measure being considered is adding roof insulation, it’s helpful to know how long the current roof has been on the building, so there is an idea of how much insulation is already there. And, if the user knows more about their building like the solar heat gain coefficient for their windows, or the specific U-value of the roof assembly, there is a detailed inputs screen for those who can get more specific. With basic information about the building and particular measures, the RSE builds and runs hundreds of custom energy simulations in seconds to investigate the effect of the selected energy saving measures individually and in groups. This allows users to consider interactive effects between different measures. For example, installing higher-efficiency lighting can reduce the cooling load by decreasing the heat from light fixtures. Mixing and matching measures lets users scope impacts that work for them. Try it out by visiting: www.newbuildings.org/retrofit-savings-estimator