Building Monitoring System and Preliminary Results for a Retrofitted Office Building

Existing commercial buildings in the United States consumed 18.42 quadrillion Btus of primary energy in 2008 which amounts to 18.4% of all energy consumed and 78% of all electricity in the United States (DOE 2011). The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (EIA 2011) shows a flat energy consumption profile between 1983 and 2003 indicating no real improvement in the aggregate commercial building stock. Buildings less than 100,000 square feet account for 65% of the commercial building floor space (EIA 2011). These buildings fall into three general categories: privately owned, state owned or federally owned and they can be either owner occupied or tenant occupied. According to a recent report, only 25 percent of small building owners plan to make energy efficiency improvements (IFMA 2009). The current state of the building retrofit market incorporates disparate modeling tools that generally do not take into account utility bills, are expensive to populate with data and provide a wide bandwidth of results. Equipment, subsystems, sensors and controls are designed as discrete solutions to narrow problems, and performance is more a matter of meeting individual rating standards than integrated building load profiles. Finally, the construction industry itself is structurally fragmented leading to suboptimal results. Given the preceding, one can only conclude deep energy efficiency retrofits of average existing buildings will be multifaceted and challenging. This paper will explore The Energy Efficient Buildings Hub (EEB Hub) commercial building testbed program designed to: provide researchers with detailed existing building level performance and indoor environmental quality data develop and/or validate existing and new building load models assess dynamic control systems examine current energy auditing practices and develop new strategic asset management practices validate building integrated technology performanc