SEARCH · Engineering Papers
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.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
This report describes the methodology and results of a state cost-effectiveness analysis of ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2019. Moving to the Standard 90.1-2019 edition from Standard 90.1-2016 is found to be cost-effective for the state. Annual energy cost savings, added construction costs, and life-cycle costs are all described and presented here for various building types and climate zones.
This report describes the methodology and results of a state cost-effectiveness analysis of ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2019. Moving to the Standard 90.1-2019 edition from Standard 90.1-2016 is found to be cost-effective for the state. Annual energy cost savings, added construction costs, and life-cycle costs are all described and presented here for various building types and climate zones.
This report describes the methodology and results of a state cost-effectiveness analysis of ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2019. Moving to the Standard 90.1-2019 edition from Standard 90.1-2016 is found to be cost-effective for the state. Annual energy cost savings, added construction costs, and life-cycle costs are all described and presented here for various building types and climate zones.
This report describes the methodology and results of a state cost-effectiveness analysis of ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2019. Moving to the Standard 90.1-2019 edition from Standard 90.1-2016 is found to be cost-effective for the state. Annual energy cost savings, added construction costs, and life-cycle costs are all described and presented here for various building types and climate zones.
This report describes the methodology and results of a state cost-effectiveness analysis of ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2019. Moving to the Standard 90.1-2019 edition from Standard 90.1-2016 is found to be cost-effective for the state. Annual energy cost savings, added construction costs, and life-cycle costs are all described and presented here for various building types and climate zones.
This report describes the methodology and results of a state cost-effectiveness analysis of ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2019. Moving to the Standard 90.1-2019 edition from Standard 90.1-2016 is found to be cost-effective for the state. Annual energy cost savings, added construction costs, and life-cycle costs are all described and presented here for various building types and climate zones.
Open Market ESCO’s (OME) Transforming Public Housing through Deep Energy Retrofits project demonstrated new design and financing solutions for implementing deep energy retrofits (DERs) in occupied low-income multifamily housing. The Project performed an integrated project delivery process, including designing low-carbon retrofit solution packages, construction pricing, and financing. The Project developed a constructible and financeable DER scope for a 102-unit extremely low-income multifamily property in Boston. This Project demonstrated a replicable approach for streamlining and implementing DER projects in occupied housing, including real solutions for overcoming design complexities and cost barriers.
As states and local governments weigh how to spur economic growth, stimulate job creation, and simultaneously adapt to meet climate goals, modern energy codes, and energy demand, this report provides a simple and transparent method to estimate the size of the workforce needed to support modeled deployments for energy efficiency in buildings, stationary battery energy storage (BES), solar photovoltaics (PV), and land-based wind in 2025 and 2030. In addition to a straightforward estimation method, this report includes state-level job estimates for two different deployment scenarios: a business-as-usual scenario and a more accelerated deployment scenario. The scope of the technologies included in this report is limited to four key energy technologies within the power sector that have strong job growth prospects and widespread geographic deployment potential. Although the included technologies are not all-encompassing, they have generated specific interest from state energy offices across the nation.
The Electric Access System Enhancement (EASE) project demonstrated a scalable, interoperable, and cost-effective means of integrating high penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs). The control architecture developed leveraged a Distributed Energy Resource Management System, Distribution System Operator for transacting energy, and 3rd Party DER Aggregator platform. The project identified ways to enhance the customer interconnection process to the grid and improve access to information from DERs and optimize the usage of DERs to provide energy services in a simulated day-ahead shadow market while maintain grid reliability. By integrating these capabilities into a scalable system of systems, the DSO can effectively balance DER generation and customer demand on the distribution network. This capability allows the grid to host more DER than traditionally possible on wires alone. Hosting more DER has the added benefit of supplying increased demand growth, sometimes beyond the capacity limits of the distribution network itself. This is known as a dynamic hosting capacity, which could help utilities manage the forecasted growth in electricity demand as California switch to electric vehicles and appliances. This could help to establish energy storage and PV generation as a “pseudo firm” generation resource mix if managed appropriately and provide sufficient resource adequacy for distribution capacity upgrade deferrals.
This project will study the feasibility and identify the preferred options necessary to allow the Pechanga Tribal Utility, now renamed Pechanga Western Electric (“PWE”) to carefully and thoughtfully expand from providing electrical service to the Tribe’s commercial enterprises and government center loads to also providing electrical service to the Tribe’s over 300 residential loads and potential future non-tribal commercial loads on the reservation. As well as, explore an option under which PWE will acquire solar and battery storage systems for the residential community.
REopt transforms complex energy project decisions into actionable results for building owners, utilities, and industry. Based on decades of NREL decision-support expertise, REopt guides investment in economic, resilient energy technologies. This presentation provides an overview of how REopt can help building owners, utilities, developers, and industry optimize the economic and resilience benefits of distributed energy resources.
The objective of this work was to determine the realization rate of energy and cost savings from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) Energy Savings Performance Contract (ESPC) program based on information reported by the energy services companies (ESCOs) that are carrying out ESPC projects at federal facilities. In formation was extracted from 195 measurement and verification (M&V) reports to determine reported, estimated, and guaranteed cost savings and reported and estimated energy savings for the previous contract year.
The BRICR project applied large-scale building energy modeling concepts with the aim of reducing the cost of energy efficiency targeting, design, and project development, and measurement of energy savings for energy efficiency programs implemented by local governments that serve small and medium commercial buildings (SMB). The project leveraged the services and resources of existing local government energy programs serving disadvantaged and hard-to-reach SMB customers. In contrast to programs run by utilities, local government programs generally do not have direct access to energy billing records for an entire class of customers in a geographic area, which prior research demonstrated useful for large-scale building energy model baseline development and calibration. , However, local governments are rich in public records that offer important clues about physical attributes and uses that, along with behavior, determine energy use. Relying only on public records, BRICR demonstrated development of credible baseline energy models for 3,792 office, retail, and hotel buildings. Publicly disclosed annual energy use data from a local energy benchmarking program and anonymized data from the Building Performance Database, the nation’s largest dataset about energy-related characteristics of buildings, were utilized to validate and calibrate energy models via an innovative method comparing distributions of energy intensity by fuel type for portfolios of buildings of similar size, vintage, and use. Portfolio calibration does not provide certainty that an energy model fits an individual building; the method is useful when billing data is not accessible – a common situation for researchers, energy service providers and ESCOs, local governments, and any party other than a utility. A software component was developed, the BRICR gem, which automates simulation when relevant data is added or edited by the user to a file saved in the standardized BuildingSync XML schema for energy audit data. The component was demonstrated as a simplified means to generate a mass of energy models corresponding to public records containing basic attributes such as building scale, location, use, year built, and aspect ratio in combination with building energy code prototype data corresponding to use and vintage. The component was also demonstrated as a simplified means to automate energy simulation when attributes are revised; the intention was to enable iterative improvement of the baseline model and energy savings estimates for common energy conservation measures as users revise relevant attributes based on their observations. In the context of institutional change and uncertainty for the participating local government energy programs, 13 whole building retrofits were completed. Impacts were measured by applying the CalTRACK2.0 methods to standardize measurement of normalized metered energy consumption. The GRIDMeter methods of stratified sampling and individual load shape analysis were applied to adjust for impacts of the effect of COVID-19 on retrofitted buildings in the context of all local buildings of similar size and use. Excluding impacts of the pandemic, retrofitted buildings demonstrated between 1.6% and 25.1% reduction in energy use. The project contributed use cases and feedback that helped inform evolution of the software tools and data formats that were combined for the first time in the BRICR project.
Decarbonization of the industrial heat demand through electrification where low/no-carbon electricity is used can contribute significantly to global greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction. In U.S. manufacturing, thermal processes account for approximately 75% of the total final energy demand, of which nearly 17% was consumed by conventional industrial boilers for steam generation in 2018 (this does not include boilers for combined heat and power – CHP). Steam is generally used in industry to regulate temperatures and pressures in industrial processes, dry products, strip impurities from process fluids, etc. Although all kinds of energy sources such as fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear, and electricity can generate steam, fossil fuels’-fired boilers are dominant in U.S. manufacturing. Electric boilers, which are a mature technology, have a small market share for steam generation in the global and U.S. industry (approximately 2% in U.S. manufacturing) due to several techno-economic reasons.
The electricity sector represents the centerpiece of decarbonization pathways for the state. Decrease in the cost of renewable electricity generation, combined with ample solar energy, wind and other renewable resources, presents a realistic way to achieve electricity generation that is nearly free of CO 2 emissions by mid-century. Expansion of renewable electricity supply could allow replacement of many CO 2 -emitting technologies with ones that use electricity—in transportation, buildings, and possibly industry. Key elements of the path for California’s electricity sector are: restrain electricity demand through higher efficiency, rapidly expand renewable electricity generation, develop electricity storage to complement renewable electricity, manage flexible electricity loads for a low-carbon electricity system, electrify where appropriate to reduce CO 2 emissions, and maintain reliable and resilient electricity supply. This report provides an overview of a multitude of innovative technologies in each of the above areas that have the potential to help the state meet its decarbonization goals, while lowering costs and promoting greater reliability. The information presented provides a portrait of the landscape of technology innovation that can help policymakers, state agencies, and interested parties develop strategies to meet the state’s goals and to target efforts to support and nurture technology innovation.
In support of DOE’s move toward transformational whole-building upgrades and enclosure solutions, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are partnering and collaborating with leading building science researchers and home-performance entities to identify and characterize technical and economic barriers to façade retrofits in an effort to identify market-viable façade solutions and opportunities for an actionable plan to transform the market. The project includes partnerships with Building Science Corporation (BSC) and a combination of strategic implementation partners with home-performance and retrofit expertise and industry contacts. The project will include expert advisory and review consultation from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (LBNL’s) Residential Windows & Attachments team and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Building Envelope team. The project consists of three parts: 1. a market analysis that captures the current state of the façade retrofit market and includes housing characteristics and retrofit costs, façade retrofit approaches and materials, contractor business models and workforce requirements to support advanced façade approaches; 2. an economic analysis focused on the viability of advanced façade retrofit approaches and materials; and 3. field demonstration of façade retrofits that include enhanced insulation/air-sealing and window technologies in multiple climate zones. This report represents the market analysis, as outlined in item 1 above. The goal of this analysis is to provide a techno-economic study that supports comprehensive retrofits of residential enclosures that include traditional approaches, and integrated wall assemblies and windows that result in durable, energy efficient, and marketable strategies. This study will provide a better knowledge base regarding the viable market for façade retrofit strategies, identify the barriers to uptake, analyze economic opportunities, and develop documentation specifically aimed to overcome technical and market barriers associated with installation.
This project is aimed at creating a transactive energy market to address the challenges faced by utility providers when increasing distributed energy resource (DER) adoption in their service area. One major challenge is mitigating export back to the grid during times of excess production. The transactive energy market operates at the distribution level and balances the supply and demand on the feeder, thus maintaining a zero-energy export at the primary feeder head. The market participants in this case are the residential customers on the feeder, who bid into the market. Building controls are then optimized based on the settled price. Market performance was demonstrated in this study by simulating different levels of DER penetration on a selected Pepco feeder. The feeder successfully achieved a zero export while providing cost-effective electricity to the participants, demonstrating that this market design can enable high DER penetration on existing feeders.
This report seeks to inform the potential for motor systems to support decarbonization by estimating their potential energy, electricity cost, and CO 2 emissions reduction potential from adoption of proven energy efficiency actions and advanced technologies. This is the third and final report in a series of reports disseminating the findings of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Motor System Market Assessment (MSMA). The MSMA and this report focus on polyphase motor systems greater than or equal to 1 horsepower (hp) in the industrial and commercial sectors. In the U.S. Industrial and Commercial Motor System Market Assessment Report Volume 1: Characteristics of the Installed Base (Volume 1 report), it was determined that these motor systems consume more than 1,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually. This equates to 29% of the U.S. electric grid load and results in 765 million metric tons (MMT) of CO 2 emissions and $166 billion in electricity costs. This report finds that substantial reductions to these energy, cost, and emissions impacts are possible, with three areas of significant opportunity being (1) improved load matching, (2) replacing older inefficient motors with more efficient motors, and (3) improving the condition of fluid (e.g., air, water, compressed air) distribution systems. A summary of the savings potential from these three opportunities placed within the context of the overall consumption for motor systems is illustrated in Figure ES 1 (industrial) and Figure ES 2 (commercial).