This website provides a portal to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) research and development in energy benchmarking for homes, commercial buildings and industrial applications. Benchmarking is useful for property owners, facilities operators, and designers. It facilitates energy accounting, comparing a facility's energy use to similar facilities in order to assess opportunities for improvement, and quantifying/verifying energy savings. LBNL's work includes research on benchmarking techniques, services, and databases as well as the development and evaluation of specific benchmarking tools.
Follow the links below for more information and publications on specific projects.
METHODS, DATABASES, & SERVICES FOR TOOL DEVELOPERS
- > LBNL Action-Oriented Benchmarking System: A web service consisting of a set of non-residential benchmarking and visualization methods that draw upon a database containing sets buildings that can be combined in various ways to obtain "peer groups" against which individual buildings can be compared. The AOB System is used to author a new generation of "action-oriented" tools in which the benchmarking process leads directly to guidance and recommendations on how to improve energy efficiency. The first such tool is EnergyIQ (described below) [more info: Evan Mills and Paul Mathew]
TOOLS
WHOLE BUILDINGS TOOLS
- > Energy IQ: A web-based implementation of the LBNL AOB System for non-residential buildings. [more info: Evan Mills and Paul Mathew] Try the demo
- > Cal-Arch: a tool for benchmarking whole-building energy for California commercial buildings. > sample analysis < [more info: Mary Ann Piette]
- > Home Energy Saver: a tool to help consumers identify ways to save energy in their homes. > sample analysis < [more info: Evan Mills]
- > CoolCalifornia.org: a comprehensive carbon footprint calculator for homes and businesses [more info: Evan Mills]
SPECIALIZED FACILITY & PROCESS TOOLS
- > BEST: Benchmarking and Energy Savings Tool for Industries
- Excel-based spreadsheet tools for use by industries to benchmark a plant's energy intensity to "best practice" and to identify energy-efficiency options that can be implemented. Data on annual energy use by fuel and characteristics of major production process at the facility is used by the spreadsheet tool to compare the plant to global best practice. "Best practice" is defined as the plant with the most energy-, and, for certain industries, water-efficient, commercially-available technologies for each step of the manufacturing process, taking into account the variables entered by the user (such as product and feedstock mix or location of the plant).
- Cement Industry: (forthcoming) [more info: Lynn Price]
- Steel Industry [more info: Lynn Price]
- Wineries: > sample analysis < does not work on Macs [more info: Christina Galitsky and Lynn Price]
- > High-Tech Buildings
- Laboratories: a national database with whole-building and system-level energy use data for laboratories. > sample analysis < [more info: Paul Mathew]
- Cleanrooms: cleanroom level, system level, and selected equipment energy use data based upon measured performance. > sample analysis < [more info: Bill Tschudi]
- Data Centers: data center, system-level, and selected equipment energy use data, based on measured performance.
- Self-benchmarking tool is also available. > sample analysis < [more info: Bill Tschudi]
- Data Center Energy Profiler (DCPro) [Beta] [more info: Paul Mathew]
INDIVIDUAL END-USE OR COMPONENT TOOLS
- > Commercial Windows: facade design tool provides information on windows for high performance commercial buildings in various US climates, including performance design issues, materials and assemblies, window design decisions, and case studies. > sample analysis < [more info Eleanor Lee and Steve Selkowitz]
- > Fan-Filter Units: metrics and methods for characterizing the energy performance of fan-filter units for use in clean environments. > sample analysis < [more info: Tim Xu]
- > Uninterruptible Power Supplies: See tool for calculating savings for high-efficiency power conversion in data centers. > sample analysis < [more info: Bill Tschudi]
- > Power Supplies for IT equipment: See tool for calculating savings from more efficient server power supplies. > sample analysis < [more info: Bill Tschudi]
- > Enterprise Servers: Includes benchmarking procedure for server energy-performance benchmarking [more info: Jon Koomey and Bruce Nordman]
RELATED PROCESSES & TOOLS
- > Cost-Effectiveness of Commercial-buildings Commissioning and Retrocommissioning: Ongoing database and meta-analysis of commercial buildings (retro)commissioning efforts. Current database contains results for 224 buildings in 22 states. [more info: Evan Mills]
- > Monitoring-based Commissioning: The project uses predictive benchmarking to prioritize candidate commissioning projects within and across multiple campuses. The University of California (UC), California State University (CSU), and California Investor-Owned Energy Utilities are collaborating in an innovative new program to retro-commission campus facilities with the assistance of permanently installed energy monitoring equipment and trending capability. This monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx) effort spans twenty-five campuses, with nine projects for plant systems and 37 projects for buildings. Half of the buildings include laboratory or other energy-intensive space. [more info: Karl Brown]
- > Continuous Performance-Monitoring Systems for Commercial Buildings: A research and development project on performance monitoring in large commercial buildings. The goal of this project was to promote continuous performance monitoring systems in large commercial buildings in order to provide building operators with ready access to improved information to operate buildings more efficiently and reduce other operating costs. [more info: Phil Haves and Rob Hitchcock]
Click here for a list of world-wide benchmarking tools and resources.