Commercial Building Energy Saver: An energy retrofit analysis toolkit

Abstract

h i g h l i g h t sCommercial Building Energy Saver is a powerful toolkit for energy retrofit analysis. CBES provides benchmarking, load shape analysis, and model-based retrofit assessment. CBES covers 7 building types, 6 vintages, 16 climates, and 100 energy measures. CBES includes a web app, API, and a database of energy efficiency performance. CBES API can be extended and integrated with third party energy software tools. a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c tSmall commercial buildings in the United States consume 47% of the total primary energy of the buildings sector. Retrofitting small and medium commercial buildings poses a huge challenge for owners because they usually lack the expertise and resources to identify and evaluate cost-effective energy retrofit strategies. This paper presents the Commercial Building Energy Saver (CBES), an energy retrofit analysis toolkit, which calculates the energy use of a building, identifies and evaluates retrofit measures in terms of energy savings, energy cost savings and payback. The CBES Toolkit includes a web app (APP) for end users and the CBES Application Programming Interface (API) for integrating CBES with other energy software tools. The toolkit provides a rich set of features including: (1) Energy Benchmarking providing an Energy Star score, (2) Load Shape Analysis to identify potential building operation improvements, (3) Preliminary Retrofit Analysis which uses a custom developed pre-simulated database and, (4) Detailed Retrofit Analysis which utilizes real-time EnergyPlus simulations. CBES includes 100 configurable energy conservation measures (ECMs) that encompass IAQ, technical performance and cost data, for assessing 7 different prototype buildings in 16 climate zones in California and 6 vintages. A case study of a small office building demonstrates the use of the toolkit for retrofit analysis. The development of CBES provides a new contribution to the field by providing a straightforward and uncomplicated decision making process for small and medium business owners, leveraging different levels of assessment dependent upon user background, preference and data availability.

Modeling of HVAC operational faults in building performance simulation

“…Techniques for building information modeling and whole-building energy simulation have improved significantly in the past two decades with the help of great advances in computational power and algorithms. These techniques have been widely used in the current architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry throughout the world to support building physics research and actual new/retrofitting building design, operation, and management [27][28][29].…”

“…Moreover, modeling operational faults is critical to achieving more reliable energy model calibrations when most energy models for existing buildings assume ideal conditions without any operational problems. This ability to estimate the severity of common faults is expected to improve the accuracy and transparency of the calibrated model, therefore increasing the analysis accuracy of different retrofit measures [14,15].…”

An exergy-based multi-objective optimisation model for energy retrofit strategies in non-domestic buildings

“…Among the most recent developments are ROBESim [11], CBES [12] and SLABE [13]. On the other hand, Rysanek and Choudhary [14] developed an exhaustive retrofit simulation tool using TRNSYS [15] and MatLab [16]; the tool is capable to simulate a large set of building retrofit strategies under economic uncertainty.…”

A pattern-based automated approach to building energy model calibration

“…The application was made accessible to users through the development of a web-based platform called the Commercial Building Energy Saver or CBES toolkit [51]. The CBES toolkit is intended to be used for small and medium office and retail buildings in California.…”