This activity includes gathering historic energy usage and costs (e.g., reviewing past energy bills) tabulating building information such as size and age and capturing other relevant context including weather, building-use patterns (e.g., hours of operation), and known age of energy consuming building equipment (e.g., HVAC systems). Establishing an energy performance baseline will help you understand how your buildings are performing. This starts with a simple, yet thorough assessment to measure performance and identify potential improvements. Improving the energy performance of a building begins with understanding how that building is performing today. Understanding how much energy your buildings are using and how that compares to similar types of buildings is an important first step to understanding where energy efficiency improvements could be made and how much opportunity for savings they could offer.
These savings can be leveraged to save taxpayer dollars, supplement limited operating budgets, and pay for other public priorities. In many buildings, energy costs can be reduced by 20 percent or more through the identification and implementation of energy conservation measures (ECMs). These evaluations can also identify aging or faulty equipment (reducing the occurrence of urgent upgrades motivated by equipment failures) and electrification opportunities (improving indoor air quality and reducing onsite-generated GHG emissions). Proactive building analysis afford decision makers with time to design more comprehensive projects that maximize energy and cost savings.
A carefully designed, targeted energy retrofit can pay for itself through energy savings and, depending on how the project is financed, can incur no debt and result in minimal disruption to an organization’s operating and capital budgets. Investing in energy-efficiency retrofits offers significant opportunities and benefits, including energy, water, and cost savings, a shorter deferred-maintenance backlog, improved occupant comfort, and progress toward overarching energy- and greenhouse gas (GHG)- reduction goals.
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