Where's the Beef in Continuous Commissioning? Results from 140 Buildings in Commercial Property and Higher Education

Persistent commissioning, also known as Continuous Commissioning® or Monitoringbased Commissioning, uses technology to mine savings from a stream of data from building management systems. It has proved to be an effective approach to delivering verifiable savings for commercial and institutional customers. Continuous monitoring of the building uncovers savings opportunities over the life of the project, which typically runs for at least three years 1 . In our experience, well-qualified buildings can deliver 11-20% of the addressable energy spend (i.e. energy consumption that is visible from the monitoring data-stream). The successful project combines automated data mining with experienced engineering support. The engineering support is a critical component. Many facility teams are resistant to dashboards, however sophisticated, because they lack the time, skills, and/or budget to take action on the information. In this paper we discuss the driving factors behind persistent commissioning, the settings where it has proved successful, the details of how savings are delivered, the challenges and strategies to overcome them, and finally, some thoughts on the design of incentive programs to support persistent commissioning. All commissioning activities deliver non-energy benefits. While the energy industry has developed robust EM&V procedures for energy savings from commissioning measures, the procedures for non-energy benefits are a work in progress. As a result, this paper focuses exclusively on the energy savings. We note that this approach is now moving from the early adopter phase into early majority, where cautious facility teams can rely on solid case studies over multiple years. This is an opportune time to be considering the role of persistent commissioning in a program portfolio.