Is your building as energy efficient as it could be? The Department of Defense (DoD) answers that question with “probably not.” Utility costs for buildings often include costs for energy that is not used efficiently and are typically considered the “price of doing business.” Energy audits can assess how much a building is using and recommend energy conservation measures to increase energy efficiencies.

Although it is good practice to perform energy audits, DoD faces a particularly difficult challenge: the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires that 25% of buildings be subject to annual energy audits. In addition to the immense scale of the DoD building stock, the Department also has an extremely diverse building stock to contend with. Given this intensive requirement, ESTCP’s Energy & Water (EW) program completed several demonstrations targeting building energy audits. These demonstrations have proven measures to conserve energy, increase efficiency, decrease time required, and reduce costs of energy audits to the DoD end user through less invasive and more prioritized methods.

On December 18, 2014, ESTCP will offer a webinar which highlights two innovative energy audit technologies. Ms. Cara Brill, a Project Manager for FirstFuel Software, will present results from the Rapid Building Assessment project. This project examined how DoD can measure the impact of remote energy audits across hundreds of buildings. To conduct each remote audit, FirstFuel utilized four pieces of information: (1) one year of historical electric interval consumption data, (2) weather data from the building’s closest weather station, (3) geographical information systems (GIS) information from the building’s location, and (4) a building information survey completed by DoD site energy managers. Walk-through audits can cost several thousand dollars and take weeks to complete. In contrast, FirstFuel’s remote audits can be accomplished in hours, regardless of size or type of building, and at a fraction of the cost without a site visit, while simultaneously yielding performance analysis results similar to ASHRAE Level II on-site audits. Details about this demonstration are currently available on the project page linked above.

Mr. Oliver Davis, CEO and Founder of concept3D, will be providing the results on the Electronic Auditing Tool with Geometry Capture project. Led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the project relied on concept3D to lead the construction of the audit interface. The project integrated an established energy auditing methodology for DoD facilities, building geometry capture software, an established whole-building energy simulation engine, and a database of building component information into a single computer-based tablet and desktop software tool for energy auditing. This tool will facilitate fast and accurate data collection, accelerate the identification and analysis of potential energy conservation measures, enhance the quality and consistency of audit reports, and store audit data in a standardized format. Results from the project will be available at the end of December 2014.

To register for this free webinar please visit: . An archived version of the webinar will also be available on the SERDP and ESTCP website after the presentation.