Establishing Building-Level Energy Goals in Procurement Documents: Lessons Learned from Pilot Utility and Portfolio Projects: Preprint

Encouraging commercial building owners to set measurable energy goals before design begins can drive design and contractor teams to develop innovative energy efficiency solutions within conventional building budgets. A federal building owner piloted this technique and created a large-scale zero energy office building on a budget comparable to local market construction rates. The successes and lessons learned from this performance-based procurement project formed the basis of an expanded program using utilities as the outreach channel to replicate the approach. The utilities delivered incentive-based offerings to focus building owners on the whole building rather than on individual building components and systems. In addition, a ripple effect was evident, with individual building owners as well as owners of multiple-building portfolios adopting the techniques, sometimes with variations, but always maintaining the same core principles. The original performance-based procurement process and its successful implementation in a federal building project informed all these efforts. Those successes and lessons learned demonstrate that the approach can be adapted to utility programs with some variation and is a powerful tool for engaging building owners as they make critical design decisions that impact energy performance over the life of the building.