The Department of Energy Building Technologies Program released a study earlier this month that shows the nation is making progress toward the DOE’s goal to create the technology and knowledge needed to make marketable commercial Zero Energy Buildings (ZEBs) a reality by 2025. The study found that there is still a lot to be done before the goal is a reality, however.
The need for more efficient commercial buildings is clear. Currently, according to the study, which was conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), commercial buildings account for 18 percent of energy consumption in the United States. That number is poised to rise, the study’s authors wrote, because the national building stock has new buildings added to it faster than old ones are decommissioned.
The DOE looked at six buildings around the United States designed to be highly efficient commercial buildings. It found that the efforts of owners and designers to create highly efficient buildings worked. All of the buildings are performing very well and are using 25 percent to 70 percent less power than code. This is not zero energy consumption, however.
To reach that goal, the study found that there is no single efficiency measure or checklist of measures that can be used to make a building into a low-energy one. Instead, the right combination of off-the-shelf and state-of-the-shelf technologies must be examined and combined to do the job for an individual building. Further, the study urges planners and building owners to design the system as a full system, and to keep an eye on buildings after they are in use because they are not always used by occupants as designed.
Other best practices that should help lead the way to office parks filled with ZEBs are the integration of day lighting into the building envelope and its systems, the design of natural ventilation systems with automatic controls to minimize occupant interference, and the inclusion of demand response controls that work in conjunction with on-site power generation systems, day lighting controls to reduce peak demand charges.
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