Note: this month’s meeting will be at Legacy Health’s Good Samaritan campus in NW Portland but is in a different building. It will be in the Northrup conference room located on the ground floor of the Northrup building.

Presenter:  Adam Scherba from the New Buildings Institute

Topic: Low-cost inverse energy modeling for building performance diagnostics and benchmarking

To make dramatic progress toward very low-energy buildings, owners, designers and energy program managers need prompt and meaningful feedback on whole-building measured performance. Such high-level insights into performance can come from properly parsed information as basic as monthly utility bills. However, these high-level performance views are not readily available, for either an owner/operator of a small, simple office or an operator of a large complex building with an energy management control system that provides a wealth of interval data and other detail.

Research has produced a simplified inverse energy model that provided insightful diagnostics into a building’s performance, using only monthly utility bills and local climate information. The same dataset used to develop a simple Energy Star score of 0 to 100 can be used to extract a deeper set of building performance metrics, which in turn are applied for both diagnostic and benchmarking purposes. Automated performance reports can be generated at a very low cost and delivered to an audience that otherwise would not be capable of investing in an energy use audit. The resulting diagnostics and benchmarking can be used by building owners in identifying operational problems, or utility and portfolio managers in prioritizing which buildings should be targeted for efficiency retrofits.