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

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaper

Abstract

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.
Original languageAmerican English
Number of pages12
StatePublished - 2018
Event2018 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings - Pacific Grove, California
Duration: 12 Aug 201817 Aug 2018

Conference

Conference2018 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings
CityPacific Grove, California
Period12/08/1817/08/18

Bibliographical note

Available from ACEEE: see https://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2018/index.html; See NREL/CP-5500-71699 for preprint

NREL Publication Number

  • NREL/CP-5500-74165

Keywords

  • buildings
  • procurement
  • utilities

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