How Monitoring-Based Commissioning Contributes to Energy Efficiency for Commercial Buildings

Monitoring-based commissioning combines permanent building energy system monitoring with established retro-commissioning protocols to achieve and maintain high performance and low energy use. A major pilot program on twenty-five California university campuses is establishing the potential contribution of monitoring-based commissioning to facility energy management. A partnership of universities and investor-owned utilities created this leading-edge effort based on a decade of research and development activity, as well as the accomplishments of innovative campuses across the country. This $5 million program funded monitoring-based commissioning for over thirty buildings, including the upgrade of permanent energy meters and other instrumentation, augmentation of energy information systems, benchmarking of building energy performance, assistance with initial commissioning efforts, and training of in-house staff. Results to date from thirteen sites significantly exceed targets: the projects reporting at the time of this writing represent 32% of total funding, while producing 66% of aggregate energy and cost savings goals for the overall program, with aggregate simple payback period of 2.3 years. These initial results suggest that monitoring-based commissioning has great promise to deliver cost-effective energy savings for higher-education campuses and other commercial facilities. The first set of thirteen projects was successful in targeting on-peak electricity use reduction, in addition to annual electricity and natural gas savings. Enhanced monitoring capability has proven valuable in identifying, diagnosing, and quantifying measures to reduce energy use. Monitoring also provides a means to increase persistence of commissioning-related savings, although evidence of this effect needs to be documented over the longer term. Future work will also explore the value of building energy use benchmarks in targeting cost-effective projects. Benchmarks have already proven valuable in assessing the relative level of success for projects, with respect to both the monitoring-based commissioning portfolio and projects in other programs.