Commercial Lighting Solutions Webtool Peer Review Report, Office Solutions

Abstract

Executive SummaryThe Commercial Lighting Solutions (CLS) project directly supports the U.S. Department of Energy's Commercial Building Energy Alliance efforts to aid in the design of high-performance buildings. DOE has launched three CBEAs: the Retailer Energy Alliance (REA), the Commercial Real Estate Energy Alliance (CREEA), and the Hospital Energy Alliance (HEA). The alliances link commercial building owners, managers, and operators, by sector. A primary focus of the alliances is to reduce the energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and operating expenses of member's buildings with the aid of advanced technologies, analytical tools, and capabilities emerging from DOE and the national laboratories.DOE has initiated research to develop a series of flexible Commercial Technology Solutions to identify the low-energy technical pathways of attaining specific energy and economic goals for specific projects. The output is a series of web-based decision tools targeting commercial building design teams. Commercial Lighting Solutions (CLS) is one of these tools, and provides options that can be used in existing buildings as well as new construction and major renovation. CLS creates energy-efficient best-practice lighting designs for widespread use. The lighting solutions are available to users via an interactive webtool that both educates and guides the user through the application of the solutions as well as providing immediate and project-specific feedback on the energy consequences of the various options.In May 2009 version 1.0 of the webtool was released and included designs for box retail. This report, one of two FY10 critical commercial planning system milestones, summarizes the peer review of the beta version of the office solutions for the CLS webtool. Peer review input will be utilized in making improvements to the webtool in preparation for the release of version 2.0, which will include both office and retail lighting solutions. In order to collect the level of detail desired from the peer review process, input was requested from professionals across the range of fields that would use and benefit from the tool. PNNL developed a list of potential reviewers and proactively invited both written input and input from qualitative interviews. Reviewers included (6) owner representatives from the CBEA, (4) lighting designers, (3) lighting manufacturers, (1) architects, (1) engineers, (2) state energyefficiency program managers and (2) utility program managers. Two internal PNNL staff also reviewed the tool for this report. (see Appendix A). The diverse representation of members ensured that all aspects of the tool were analyzed from many perspectives.The methodology for the peer review process included gathering input from interested stakeholders, analysis of the comments, and organization of the comments into categories for prioritization against a set of criteria. Based on this process, PNNL developed recommendations about which feedback will be addressed for the release of version 2.0 of the webtool at the LI...