Building analytics and monitoring-based commissioning: industry practice, costs, and savings

Abstract

As building energy and system-level monitoring becomes more common, facilities teams are faced with an overwhelming amount of data. This data does not typically lead to insights, corrective actions, and energy savings unless it is stored, organized, analyzed, and prioritized in automated ways. The Smart Energy Analytics Campaign is a public-private sector partnership program focused on supporting commercially available energy management and information systems (EMIS) technology use and monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx) practices. MBCx is an ongoing commissioning process with focus on analyzing large amounts of data on a continuous basis. EMIS tools are used in the MBCx process to organize, present, visualize, and analyze the data. With Campaign data from over 400 million square feet (sq ft) of installed space, this paper presents the results achieved by owners that are implementing EMIS, along with associated technology costs. The study's EMIS users that reported savings achieved median cost savings of $0.19/sq ft and 7 percent annually, with savings shown to increase over time. For 35 portfolio owners, median base cost to install an EMIS was $0.03/sq ft, with an annual recurring software cost of $0.02/sq ft and estimated annual labor cost of $0.03/sq ft. Two types of EMIS systemsenergy information systems and fault detection and diagnostic systems-are defined in the body of the paper. Of the two, we find that fault detection and diagnostic systems have both higher savings and higher costs. The paper offers a characterization of EMIS products, MBCx services, and trends in the industry.

Energy Management Information Systems Technical Resources Report

“…In 2020, for campaign participants who implemented AFDD, median annual savings were $0.27 per square foot, compared to deployment and recurring costs of $0.05 and $0.07 per square foot, respectively (Lin, Kramer, and Granderson). Prior campaign analyses of other EMIS capabilities, such as Interval Meter Analytics, showed similar or higher rates of return (Kramer et al 2019b…”

“…After the survey, the initial hardware and software architecture of the EMIS can be designed and used to create a budget, business case, and obtain necessary approvals. When the budget is assembled it should include all costs inherent to an EMIS solution, including: (Lin, Kramer, and Granderson 2020;Kramer et al 2019b).…”

Enhancing Performance Contracts with Monitoring-Based Commissioning (MBCx)

“…MBCx service providers can support the deployment of MBCx software and can effectively lead or support ongoing operations including the identification, prioritization, validation, and verification phases. Some customers may not access their MBCx software directly, relying primarily on their MBCx service provider's guidance or reporting (Kramer et al 2020). This can also occur, for example, where MBCx service providers function as subcontractors within a performance contract project.…”

Building fault detection data to aid diagnostic algorithm creation and performance testing

“…As buildings become more data rich, and as data science comes to buildings, FDD is of increasing relevance to the building community. Outside of the research community, building owners and operators at the leading edge of technology adoption are using FDD to enable median whole-building portfolio savings of 7% 3 . Modern commercial and research-grade FDD technologies often integrate with building automation systems (BAS) to obtain operational controls data for their algorithms, or are implemented as retrofit add-ons to existing equipment.…”