Could your commercial building or house use a little nip and tuck, or will it need more radical reconstruction to become as robust and energy-efficient as many of its contemporaries—not to mention the new generation of green buildings breaking ground every day?
The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), an independent, entrepreneurial, non-profit “think-and-do tank” located in Colorado, is advocating whole-system retrofits to achieve results of any significance. According to the company website, traditional ways of saving energy in commercial buildings are inadequate in both depth (savings per square foot) and scale (square footage improved each year). Current trends and performance levels would increase fossil fuel use in U.S. commercial buildings by 2050.
Yet modern technologies could save six times as much energy as, say, building 100 nuclear power plants, while saving nearly half of U.S. and electricity, and decreasing, not increasing, utility bills.
According to a U.S. Department of Energy fact sheet for the year 2010, U.S. buildings of all types—housing, commercial, government—use more energy than any other sector of the U.S. economy. In fact, buildings consume more than 70 percent of electricity and more than 50 percent of natural gas, nationwide.
Rocky Mountain Institute is committed to changing how American buildings use energy. RMI’s efforts take three main forms: transforming design, busting barriers, and spreading innovation. To accomplish these goals, RMI emphasizes strategic influence—changing the mindset of the people who make the rules—and “institutional acupuncture,” to get blocked business logic flowing.
In order to achieve widespread adoption of deep building retrofits, RMI advocates energy modeling of buildings to accurately identify potential energy savings. And while the number of energy modeling practitioners has exploded over a short period of time, significant opportunities exist to ensure that a rapidly growing industry can deliver cost-effective and high-quality analysis.
RMI took a major step toward developing a coordinated long-term vision for the energy modeling community with its Building Energy Modeling (BEM) Innovation Summit, held in March in Boulder, Colorado. The meeting was developed in partnership with the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) , a trade association; IBPSA-USA, the U.S. affiliate of the International Building Performance Simulation Association; and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a non-profit organization dedicated to sustainable building design and construction. Sixty-five key stakeholders enrolled for the summit, to learn how to more effectively use modeling to make a compelling financial case for low-energy buildings, identify best practices, and address short-term challenges.
Amir Roth, DOE’s Program Manager for building performance simulation tools, commented that the Summit outlined “explicit short-term goals that should really make a big difference and get the ball rolling."
Nicholas Long from the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, encouraged RMI to keep pushing the building modeling community, as “RMI is uniquely qualified to make a difference.”
"There is a lack of confidence in the quality, consistency, and reproducibility of energy modeling results,” said RMI Senior Consultant Kendra Tupper, who spearheaded the summit. “Coupled with the fact that it’s time-consuming and expensive to conduct quality analyses, it’s difficult for practitioners to effectively use energy modeling to inform design and make compelling business cases for investing in energy efficiency.
“This will be the first time key stakeholders from all aspects of the energy modeling field come together to jointly address barriers and opportunities,” she continued. “We are excited by the positive response we’ve gotten thus far and look forward to making this an increasingly more collaborative and coordinated industry.”
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Cheryl Kaften is an accomplished communicator who has written for consumer and corporate audiences. She has worked extensively for MasterCard (News - Alert) Worldwide, Philip Morris USA (Altria), and KPMG, and has consulted for Estee Lauder and the Philadelphia Inquirer Newspapers. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Jennifer Russell
