Consortium for Energy Efficiency Members Take FLEXLAB® Tour, Attend Energy Management Workshop

January 30, 2014

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) recently teamed with the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE) to host a workshop on commercial energy management, and tours of Berkeley Lab's new Facility for Low Energy eXperiments in Buildings (FLEXLAB®). Tour attendees learned about how FLEXLAB can test the performance of emerging building technologies. About 40 people attended.

The workshop's purpose was to address how Berkeley Lab and CEE are working together to integrate energy management information systems (EMIS) with approaches to whole-building-focused energy management programs. CEE introduced its plans to pursue a specification for a commercial energy management information systems, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) conveyed experiences from their energy management programs. Berkeley Lab discussed its EMIS testing and research capabilities, as well as the need for third-party validation of key areas of EMIS performance. Berkeley Lab's work on EMIS has been funded by PG&E in partnership with QuEST (Quantum Energy Services and Technologies), with continued support from the Department of Energy's Building Technology's Office.

Berkeley Lab's Jessica Granderson co-led an afternoon session on energy baselining. It focused on what program administrators need to be able to leverage emerging tools and devices that promise to streamline the M&V process, and was followed by small group discussions. The day's final session concentrated on quantifying the performance of whole-building and system-level measurement and verification approaches. A pre-workshop survey of participants confirmed that engineering calculations are applied much more often than before- and after-energy measurement approaches as a means of estimating savings from different energy conservation measures.

Author

Mark Wilson