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Many of today's buildings suffer from what we'll call the "leak-guzzle-hide" phenomenon:
They leak billions of dollars through poor moisture, temperature and air pressure control -- akin to driving around with a massive leak in your gas tank.
They guzzle energy to satiate inefficient and often over-sized lighting, heating and cooling equipment, even when building occupancy is low. This is like commuting solo every day to work in an RV purchased for that once-a-year camping trip.
And they hide energy performance information due to poor metering and byzantine building management systems. Think about this as driving with your car's dashboard blackened out.
In fact, in its 2010 Annual Energy Outlook, the U.S. Department of Energy forecasts that buildings will soon become the fastest-growing source of demand for increasingly expensive electricity. In many countries, buildings are already the leading global cause (pdf) of greenhouse gas emissions.
While building owners struggle to tackle this trend, they also face the added challenges of high vacancy rates and tenants demanding better building performance (pdf), healthier indoor air and reduced utility bills.
The increasing number of regulatory energy mandates means that many existing commercial buildings -- which typically have life spans of 50 to 70 years -- will be legally required to reveal energy data and meet new laws that forbid continued "leaking," "guzzling" and "hiding."
Without significant renovation, today's commercial buildings may be unable to compete for tenants, financing or insurance. And if bringing them up-to-code is cost-prohibitive, some may even be left to crumble. In other words, today's asset may become tomorrow's albatross.
In fact, when we consider the fact that existing buildings far outnumber new construction (for example, the U.S. commercial building stock is 70 billion square feet as compared to annual new construction of 2 billion square feet) and is retrofitted quite rarely (for example, fewer than one third of U.S. commercial buildings have undergone heating, cooling, lighting, windows or insulation upgrades), we might be looking at a whole flock of albatross!
Unfortunately there aren't enough building engineers -- or in our analogy, car mechanics -- on the planet to deal with the sheer amount of redesign and renovation that's required. And at this scale, traditional techniques such as energy audits prove prohibitively expensive.
For example, ICF International estimated that if every commercial building owner in the U.S. did an energy audit of their buildings, it would take 1,000 auditors more than 13 years, working 365 days per year, to deliver recommendations on upgrades for 5 million buildings. So where should a savvy building portfolio owner put his next dollar?
When Autodesk faced the same question, we did what tourists do: We got out our camera.
Next Page: How rapid energy modeling works.
Apply the 80-20 Rule
I love your approach to analysis versus the energy audit. Being very experienced working owners to take on energy efficiency, the energy audit seems to me to be a red herring until you have done some basics.
The IFC estimate is not helpful and doesn't inspire action.
Your approach is excellent, since companies are going to spend for a real energy audit except in rare cases even though they would be smart to do so.
But, 20% of the actions you take to improve efficiency are going to drive 80% of the savings. For a building that is not measuring (baselining and benchmarking) its overall energy use over time and not actively working energy use reduction, you or I could list on our two hands what steps and actions they could take to get immediate steps off the top of our heads. I don't need pictures or analysis for that.
I find the Energy Star (www.energystar.gov) site EXCELLENT and the first step for any organization/building owner to begin to work energy and water efficiency through free tool, free benchmark, free training, free resources.
What would be your top 10 no brainer actions to drive continuous energy efficiency improvement? I can even do some of it by building type, e.g., restaurant versus hotel, versus office. I'm not saying energy audits aren't necessary at some point, but I would come at it backwards, i.e., what commonly delivers efficiency and is that available or applied in my building, if not do the business case. I find it startling that more companies are doing solar thermal (understand the return on solar PVC electric not fast enough yet--that should be fixed with smart feed-in tariffs and lease/loan arrangements).
Here are just a few off the top of my head?
-Does your organization have an energy 'czar' sitting on the leadership team? If not, assign and energy efficiency champion.
-Does your organization have an energy policy or plan? If not, start developing one.
-Does your organization have a cross-functional green or efficiency team(s). If not, run a process for people to be nominated to the team, help develop the teams charter and have it go after low hanging fruit first.
-Enter at least 12 months (do 36 months if you have it, even better baseline) of energy use data for each building into the free online tool Portfolio Manager and get an efficiency rating (valid benchmark for many building types) for your building to know how efficient or inefficient your building is.
-Then are your buildings properly metered. All of Rollins College was on ONE meter. You can't manage energy use on one meter for multiple buildings or a complex building?
-How efficient are your appliances and equipment? Can you afford to upgrade to highest efficiency alternatives? If not, put it on your longer term list.
-Do you need a building automation system? Can you afford it? No, then go with motion detectors for lights and programmable thermostats.
-Is your building exposure orientation mean that the building absorbs a lot of sun? Window film is cheap and not a major undertaking.
-What level of insulation does your building have? Can you radically improve the insulation in the walls or below the roof?
-Is your building or an area of the building a restaurant? If so, do you have a checklist for when things go on? When do front of house lights go on. When does first fryer go on, others. When does first oven go on, others, etc.
-Etc.
Each building is different, but the same. The 80-20 rule for the thousands of buildings that haven't been trending or actively managing their energy use will give them immediate positive feedback, i.e., savings. Hopefully, they'll be bitten by the bug and go on to energy audits. I just don't think energy audits are required in a lot of buildings.
There isn't anything here that you can't get at www.energystar.gov. I'd like to see an article that inspires organization and building owners to take advantage of what's available free and where they can have immediate wins.
Did love the article though. There are buildings that have to do audits, e.g., large hotel. Still think in that case, first step is smart, tailored metering for management and control.
Sorry to go on so long, but we need the message to be you can do a lot now without energy audit, modeling, or anything real sophisticated. Get your buildings into Portfolio Manager, free from the EPA's Energy Star Program!