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Executive SummaryBuildings consume 40% of the total energy in the U.S. and over 70% of the nation's total electricity today. Concerted efforts on both federal and state level have contributed to the flattening of electricity intensity in commercial buildings over the past decade, and declining energy intensity in homes.A new building diagnostic and controls revolution is underway within the buildings sector, primarily in the commercial buildings sector. In it, application-based systems are presenting an opportunity to implement strategies in which highly "optimized" control capable of constantly increasing efficiency levels while improving resource allocation (both local and global) is an inherent attribute of the strategy rather than an explicitly programmed feature. These building controls and algorithms can also be part of deep retrofits in existing buildings that result in energy savings not just today, but also ensure persistent energy savings over the life of the buildings through improved operation and maintenance. At the same time, the introduction of sensors and controls, as well as information technology and communication protocols between the buildings and the electric grid, has led to digitized sensing, metering, communication, and controls. This "smart grid" revolution is adding intelligence to the energy ecosystem, allowing power generators and grid operators to see the system at unprecedented levels of granularity. Added to these developments is the proliferation of photovoltaic cells, small-scale natural gas generators, as well as other distributed generation sources; giving building owners additional opportunities to reduce their energy costs and increase the reliability of their supply.Using these technological advances and careful coordination, buildings could provide valuable comfort and productivity services to building owners and occupants, such as automatically and continuously improving building operations and maintenance, while at the same time reducing energy costs. Ultimately, buildings could even act as dispatchable assets, providing services to the power system, such as absorbing the fluctuations of intermittent renewable energy.This document proposes a framework concept to achieve the objectives of raising buildings' efficiency and energy savings potential benefitting building owners and operators. We call it a transaction-based framework, wherein mutually-beneficial and cost-effective market-based transactions can be enabled between multiple players across different domains. Transaction-based building controls are one part of the transactional energy framework. While these controls realize benefits by enabling automatic, market-based intra-building efficiency optimizations, the transactional energy framework provides similar benefits using the same market-based structure, yet on a larger scale and beyond just buildings, to the electricity market and the society at large.The premise of transaction-based control is that interactions between various components in a complex energy syste...

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