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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 217 records · Page 12
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2023

Reducing Commercial Building Process Loads and Refrigeration Unit Energy Consumption

This resource provides guidance on larger PPLs, many of which are hardwired. Examples include elevators, enterprise servers, freezers, and water fountains with chillers, which are often collectively referred to as "process loads." This resource also outlines how to assess process loads in a building, describes the procedure for identifying which loads to target for reduction, and provides an overview of reduction strategies. In this resource, process loads are broken into five categories - food handling, refrigeration, internal mobility, data center and information technology, and water handling.

commercial buildings↗
DOE OSTI2021

Decarbonizing HVAC and Water Heating in Commercial Buildings

This report is intended to provide building owners and facilities engineers with heating electrification options and design considerations, as well as additional resources on key topics. The document focuses on the electrification of space heating and water heating loads using electric heat pump systems.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2020

Assessment of Commercial Building Lighting as a Frequency Regulation Resource

This paper evaluates the potential for automated lighting control as a resource for frequency regulation of the electric grid system in the context of current energy policies, economic incentives, and technological trends. The growing prevalence of renewable energy has increased the need for ancillary services to maintain grid frequency and stability. While demand side resources like heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning systems, as well as water treatment plants are already evaluated as regulation service providers, the potential application to electrical lighting systems has largely been ignored. Yet, aggregations of lighting systems that are retrofitted with intelligent controls could conceivably contribute to frequency regulation services with little impact on user comfort. To further explore the feasibility of lighting potential, this paper explores (1) how lighting control systems are limited by visual comfort perception and acceptability, (2) how such limitations impact the performance of the lighting system as an frequency regulation resource, and (3) how the market potential of lighting systems as demand side resources compares in different regional transmission organizations. Finally, the impact of developing technologies on the application of lighting systems for frequency regulation is discussed.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

Data Driven Commercial Building Energy Code Compliance and Technology Inventory for New York City

Building Performance Standards (BPS) are gaining national traction. A BPS will require new processes in the design, construction, and operation of buildings that take the occupants into account and enable predictive analysis to ensure compliance with current and future GHG emissions caps. In New York City, most buildings over 25,000 square feet will be regulated by a BPS starting in 2024, regardless of whether it is new construction permitted under current energy codes or an existing building. This research is one of the first to begin the evaluation of a long-term series of building policies in the context of an open data ecosystem, in cooperation with city agencies. Existing building policies enacted in NYC have ranged from building energy benchmarking and labeling to energy audits to the regulation of GHG emission in buildings. Through the development of a dataset related to building technologies and energy consumption, this project can help to evaluate if meaningful conclusions can be drawn for the data that has been largely self-reported in compliance with city regulations. This project will also provide lessons learned from a deep dive into these types of datasets to provide best practices for municipalities or states seeking to embark on policies like those enacted in NYC. In addition, a Building Automation System (BAS) Stretch Standard of Care (SSOC) for owners, designers, and building operators will enable the measurement and predictive analysis of energy consumption and GHG emissions at the plant, system, or component level, in anticipation of regulated GHG limits on buildings based on energy use. The SSOC is expected to be suitable for use on a national level. The primary feature of an SSOC is a standardized format for a set of BAS points that can be used to control and to gather data from individual plants, systems, or components that are related to building energy consumption. This project examined how measurements compare to prescriptive or simulation-based energy code targets, finding little correlation between predictive 8760-hour energy modeling and actual energy consumption for a small sample (n=27) of buildings constructed after 2015. Other analysis found that, while large multifamily housing (MFH) buildings showed a general trend similar to predicted reductions in energy use from the implementation of model commercial energy codes, this trend was not evident in the office, K-12 school, and hotel use groups in NYC. No upward or downward trends in energy consumption were found when buildings were grouped by size. Energy audit data were analyzed and it appears that there is bias by audit company on measures recommended to clients. Further research should be performed to cross-analyze this with other attributes, such as building size, vintage, and number of stories. Analysis found that for 281 buildings that were permitted and completed after 2015 and had submitted benchmarking data in 2022, between 81% and 96% (by use group) were found to be in compliance with the 2024 to 2029 NYC BPS emission caps, and between 55% and 89% were in compliance with the 2030-2034 caps. This work is beneficial to the public in helping policymakers and building stakeholders better understand the wide-ranging implications of a BPS.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Low-Cost Identification and Monitoring of Diverse MELs in Residential and Commercial Buildings with PowerBlade (Final Technical Report)

This report describes our progress in developing a scalable wireless metering system that integrates plug-load energy meters that measure real, reactive, and apparent power along with load monitoring based on extracting high-fidelity electrical waveform features collected at every load to capture power profiles and automatically identify and categorize MELs, and make this technology available to the research, commercial, and government sectors.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Commercial Building Energy Code Field Study (Final Report)

What is the dollar value of increasing compliance with the energy code? Ultimately, this is the question that policy makers, funders, and program implementers care about. With this in mind, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) developed a new methodology capable of determining how much energy cost savings could potentially be gained through better compliance with the code (Rosenberg et al. 2016). On March 2, 2016 DOE issued Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) Number DE-FOA-0001532, requesting proposals to develop and test a methodology for identifying the commercial energy code requirements that can provide the maximum cost-effective energy and cost savings through increased compliance. Awarded to the Institute for Market Transformation, this report summarizes the development and testing of a commercial code compliance methodology, including a summary of results, statistical analysis of sample, and best practices for others implementing a commercial energy code compliance field study.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2021

Endpoint Use Efficiency Comparison for AC and DC Power Distribution in Commercial Buildings

Advances in power electronics and their use in Miscellaneous Electric Loads (MELs) in buildings have resulted in increased interest in using low-voltage direct current (DC) power distribution as a replacement for the standard alternating current (AC) power distribution in buildings. Both systems require an endpoint converter to convert the distribution system voltage to the MELs voltage requirements. This study focused on the efficiency of these endpoint converters by testing pairs of AC/DC and DC/DC power converters powering the same load profile. In contrast to prior studies, which estimated losses based on data sheet efficiency and rated loads, in this study, we used part load data derived from real-world time-series load measurements of MELs and experimentally characterized efficiency curves for all converters. The measurements performed for this study showed no systematic efficiency advantage for commercially available DC/DC endpoint converters relative to comparable, commercially available AC/DC endpoint converters. For the eight appliances analyzed with the pair of converters tested, in 50%, the weighted energy efficiency of the DC/DC converter was higher, while, for the other 50%, the AC/DC converter was. Additionally, the measurements indicated that the common assumption of using either data sheet efficiency values or efficiency at full load may result in substantial mis-estimates of the system efficiency.

AC/DC converters↗
DOE OSTI2022

Defining and applying an electricity demand flexibility benchmarking metrics framework for grid-interactive efficient commercial buildings

Building demand flexibility (DF) research has recently gained attention. To unlock building DF as a predictable grid resource, we must establish a quantitative understanding of the resource size, performance variability, and predictability based on large empirical datasets. Researchers have proposed various sets of theoretical metrics to measure this performance. Some metrics have been applied to simulation results, but most fall short of exploring the complexities in real building applications. There are practical metrics used in individual demand response field studies but they alone cannot fulfil the job of DF benchmarking across a diverse group of buildings. The electrical grid's geographically diverse and changing nature presents challenges to comparing building DF performance measured under different conditions (i.e., benchmarking DF). To address this challenge, a novel DF benchmarking framework focused on load shedding and shifting is presented; the foundation is a set of simple, proven single-event metrics with attributes describing event conditions. These enable benchmarking and visualization in different dimensions for identifying trends that represent how these attributes influence DF. To test its feasibility and scalability, the DF framework was applied to two case studies of 11 office buildings and 121 big-box retail buildings with demand response participation data. Furthermore, these examples provided a pathway for using both building level benchmarking and aggregation to extract insights into building DF about magnitude, consistency, and influential factors. Potential applications of the framework and real-world values have been identified for grid and building stakeholders.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2020

Peak load reduction and load shaping in HVAC and refrigeration systems in commercial buildings by using a novel lightweight dynamic priority-based control strategy

Reducing peak power demand in a building can reduce electricity expenses for the building owner and contribute to the efficiency and reliability of the electrical power grid. For the building owner, reduced expenses come from the reduction or elimination of peak power charges on electricity bills. For the power system operator, reducing peak power demand leads to a more predictable load profile and reduces stress on the electric grid system. Herein we present a computationally inexpensive, dynamic, and retrofit-deployable control strategy to effect peak load reduction and load shaping. The effectiveness of the control strategy is examined in a simulation with 80 air-conditioning units and 40 refrigeration units. The results show that a peak demand reduction of 60 kW can be achieved relative to peak demand in a typical set point–based approach. The proposed strategy was deployed in a gymnasium building with four rooftop HVAC units, where it showed over 15% peak demand (kW) reduction savings while maintaining or lowering energy consumption (in kilowatt-hours) relative to the set point–based thermostat controls.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2023

Stochastic scheduling for commercial building cooling systems: considering uncertainty in zone temperature prediction

Here, this paper presents the first attempt to address the uncertainty in zone temperature prediction with stochastic optimization. The uncertain zone temperature is a process uncertainty and has not been considered in the existing stochastic optimization for building control. To fill this gap, we proposed a novel formulation of stochastic optimization to handle process uncertainty in building control. Specifically, we first examined the accuracy of a typical linear model for predicting zone temperature. We then formulated the scheduling of the building cooling system as a stochastic optimization problem over a 24-hour look-ahead period to minimize the electricity cost of the studied building cooling system. After that, we applied the proposed stochastic load scheduling (SLS) to a direct expansion (DX) cooling system that serves a medium office building. Through simulation with a detailed building energy simulation software, EnergyPlus, we evaluated the operational cost and the thermal comfort compared with a deterministic load scheduling. The operation cost of scheduling was found to vary with the level of zone temperature prediction uncertainty. The proposed SLS can mitigate the impacts of uncertain zone temperature predictions on both operational cost and thermal comfort. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed SLS works better when the uncertainty level is more significant.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2022

Model-based predictive control of multi-zone commercial building with a lumped building modelling approach

Here this study investigates the applicability of a lumped building modeling approach to model-based predictive control (MPC) to alleviate the complex modeling process of the grey-box multi-zone building model. Based on experimental data, two building models were estimated in this study. The detailed model as a reference case and a lumped model were estimated with decentralized and conventional approaches, respectively. Then, simulations were performed with two boundary conditions, including the comfort bound and electricity cost structure. The performances of the MPC with the detailed and lumped models were analyzed compared to the feedback control. More savings was achieved with a larger comfort bound and more aggressive electricity cost structure. The savings potential of the proposed lumped model approach was not as high as that of the detailed model. However, the proposed method yields good control performance, whose savings was approximately 8.6% over that of feedback control. These results suggest that the proposed method can be used to facilitate MPC implementation in multi-zone building applications.

42 ENGINEERING↗