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The Federal Energy Management Program's 'Utility Energy Service Contracts: Enabling Documents' provide legislative information and materials that clarify the authority for federal agencies to enter into utility energy service contracts, or UESCs.
The objective of this work was to determine the realization rate of energy and cost savings from the Department of Energy’s Energy Savings Performance Contract (ESPC) program based on information reported by the energy services companies (ESCOs) that are carrying out ESPC projects at federal sites. Information was extracted from 151 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. Because the quality of the reports varied, it was not possible to determine all of these parameters for each project.
Recent high-impact events such as hurricanes and wildfires highlight the need for energy system resilience. One potential impact of these events is the loss of utility grid power to federal sites, negatively affecting the ability to carry out their missions. Depending on the need to sustain critical functions, it may be important to continue operations during an outage of the electric grid, or at least have power restored quickly after the event. One approach to addressing this need is through a microgrid. Microgrids can provide a more reliable solution than the traditional approach of using a backup generator at individual buildings. A microgrid can enhance a site’s electrical power system during normal operations, as well as provide reliable backup power to critical loads when electric utility power is interrupted. Many times, certain components of a microgrid (and potentially the entire system) can be justified economically and paid for out of energy savings or avoided costs. In cases where savings can cover the project costs, one of several privately financed procurement mechanisms may be used to implement the project. Procurement options available to all federal agencies include utility energy services contracts (UESC), energy savings performance contracts (ESPC), and utility services contracts (USC); other mechanisms such as a power purchase agreement (PPA), enhanced use lease (EUL), and utility privatization (UP) may also be useful to agencies that have the authority to use them. Implementing a microgrid in a comprehensive effort that also includes energy efficiency can provide an important savings component, while reducing power requirements for critical loads, thus reducing the cost of the microgrid and associated distributed energy resources (DER). However, it can be difficult to achieve enough savings and avoided costs to cover the entire microgrid system, so leveraging these avoided costs in combination with appropriated funds may be necessary to implement the full project. When a site is deciding if a microgrid is the best solution, activities early in the process include identifying critical loads and existing DERs, conversations with the local electric utility, and implementation options that work best for the agency and site. This paper explores procurement options and agreements that may be useful to federal agencies interested in implementing microgrids at their sites. Microgrid complexities, implementation considerations, and suggestions to get started are also discussed. This information will be most useful to agencies when they are exploring electric energy system resilience options and/or considering different procurement options to meet their needs.
This report helps agency fleet managers understand and implement optimal petroleum reduction strategies for fleet locations by evaluating the most appropriate combination of the four core principles of sustainable fleet management: right-sizing the fleet to agency mission by implementing a vehicle allocation methodology study; minimizing vehicle miles traveled; increasing fleet fuel efficiency by replacing inefficient vehicles with more fuel-efficient vehicles, maintaining vehicles, driving more efficiently, and avoiding excessive idling; and optimizing cost-effective alternative fuel use, including maximizing utilization of existing alternative fuel infrastructure, installing alternative fuel infrastructure where practical (including electric vehicle charging stations), and aligning deployment of alternative fuel vehicles with fueling infrastructure.
This document provides general instructions on performing a walk-through water survey to collect the required data for a comprehensive water evaluation and entering data into the online Water Balance Tool.
This report serves as a program guide to support federal agencies in developing their own policy documents for workplace charging. It provides suggested language that agencies can incorporate into their own policies to define requirements for charging privately owned vehicles (POVs) on government-owned or leased property. The Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act authorizes the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and other federal agencies to install, operate, and maintain electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) for POVs in parking areas used by federal employees and authorized users, and it requires the collection of fees to recover the costs of installing, operating, and maintaining this equipment. This guide offers details for agency facility managers, transportation personnel, employees, and vendors regarding the charging of electric vehicles (EVs) for use by employees and personnel at government-owned and leased buildings. This guide describes the requirements associated with federal agencies providing EV charging in publicly accessible sites. The policy also describes when and how fees may be imposed to cover costs of electricity, as well as EVSE units and installations in various scenarios.
This report explores existing research on the use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), looking specifically at industry claims regarding the benefits of LEDs for human health and comfort.
This report presents a review of literature and current best practices along the intersection of energy efficiency and occupant health at U.S. healthcare facilities, including federally owned buildings. It also includes a review of minimum code requirements for healthcare indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and research on building measures that optimize occupant health and energy efficiency.
Federal fleet operations span the diverse geography of the country as the vehicles provide services in support of equally diverse agency missions. Fleets face the potential for disruption of services from natural disasters, infrastructure failures, and human threats. This report reviews some of the hazards, threats, and disruptions that fleets may face, describes an approach to fleet management that incorporates resilience, and provides an overview of fleet resilience considerations. While this report is not comprehensive, it describes considerations for integrating resilience into fleet management organizational priorities.
This report illustrates how energy management information systems (EMIS) can enable federal agencies to improve energy performance, reduce costs, and meet energy goals. The guide discusses how to identify and implement needed EMIS functions and capabilities, covering the entire EMIS life cycle including system design, procurement, implementation, and ongoing maintenance.
The report is designed to help federal facility managers, engineers, contractors, and consultants identify the most common PV system vulnerabilities that could lead from mild to catastrophic loss of PV systems during severe weather events. The guide helps users understand the type and severity of severe weather that can occur at any given location, and provides pre- and post-storm operations and maintenance (O&M) measures that can reduce the potential for damage to a PV system during a severe weather event and help speed the recovery of a PV system damaged during a storm. The guide emphasizes safety in responding to damage from severe weather events.
Ten high-performance quad-pane windows (five quad-pane with suspended film and five quad-pane with thin glass) were installed at Building 41 of the Denver Federal Center in Colorado as part of a demonstration project to assess their thermal performance, life cycle costs, and deployment potential for replacing older single-pane windows. The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory performed several different evaluations to assess the viability of the quad-pane windows for GSA applications. Some of these assessments were performed with models, while others required onsite evaluations including time series measurements.
This paper was prepared in support of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management Program. The paper serves as a resource for site-level personnel who are performing energy and water resilience planning at their sites and who need to identify and incorporate data that may help them assess risks to infrastructure and operations as a result of future climate change impacts. Specifically, the paper is a high-level look at available scenarios of future climate that can be incorporated into assessments based on U.S. regional models.
The emergence of distributed energy resources (DERs) has transformed the electric power sector and will likely have even more profound impacts on the future evolution of the United States energy sector as it modernizes and becomes more reliant upon complex informatics programming and systems to ensure that our power grid remains safe from malicious interference. To mitigate risks associated with the increased and diversified use of DERs, the Distributed Energy Resource Cybersecurity Framework (DER-CF) was developed in 2019. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory extended the scope of the DER-CF to include the RMF. To address the challenges faced by federal energy managers and energy system stakeholders in applying the RMF to DER systems, the Distributed Energy Resource Risk Manager (DER-RM) is a six-step process to proactively manage cybersecurity risk in a methodical manner. The DER-RM is independent of the DER-CF's existing assessment, allowing users to focus specifically on the RMF steps. The tools are targeted to different processes - DER-CF enables organizations to perform self-assessments to improve their cybersecurity posture, while DER-RM assists organizations in achieving compliance with specific requirements. This document provides an overview of the DER-RM. The RMF process outlined in this report serves as a guide to diagnose information and operational system threats, gather required materials to comply with industry standards, and document plans for achieving Authority to Operate. Using the DER-RM, federal agencies and other organizations can easily and intuitively follow the RMF process, manage the risks to their grid-edge infrastructure through the integration of their on-site DERs, and comply with appropriate requirements.
The 2015 Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act authorizes the installation, operation, and maintenance of electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) for the purpose of recharging employees' privately owned vehicles (POVs) under the custody or control of the General Services Administration (GSA) or a Federal agency. It requires the collection of fees to recover the costs of installing, operating, and maintaining this equipment and imposes reporting requirements. This program guide reviews those requirements, excerpts the relevant language in Appendix A, and describes when and how fees may be required to cover costs of electricity, network costs, EVSE units, and installations in various scenarios. This program guide is designed to support Federal agencies developing and refining workplace charging programs for employee POVs. While it provides guidance and best practices, it does not replace agencywide policies or agency-specific legal counsel. It contains a roadmap for agency workplace charging programs and defines roles and responsibilities. This guide explains how to determine the number of POVs likely to charge at a given site and contains a sample employee survey in Appendix B. It reviews EVSE planning, including unit selection and acquisition, charger location(s), accounting for available power capacity, using existing infrastructure, and funding an incentive program. It also discusses the costs associated with EVSE acquisition, installation, and network management. These costs inform the subsequently provided information, which describes how to amortize costs to determine appropriate fees for each charging session. The final two sections of this guide address aspects of ongoing program management that the facility coordinator should consider and the reporting requirements associated with the FAST Act. The insights in this guide are applicable to all agency-owned and GSA-leased buildings or facilities offering the use of EVSE or a 120-volt receptacle for the purpose of recharging an employee's POV. However, the FAST Act requirements typically do not apply to any building or facility operated and maintained by a third-party vendor offering the use of EVSE as part of a commercial building lease unless the agency is managing the station and/or energy on behalf of the building and collecting POV fees.
Case study describes Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's (PNNL) three-month Rock the Watt campaign to reduce energy use at its main campus in Richland, Washington. The campaign objectives were to educate PNNL employees about energy conservation opportunities in their workplace and to motivate them to help PNNL save energy and costs and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Case study describes how the Northwest/Arctic Region branch of the General Services Administration (GSA) improved safety and energy efficiency in its Fairbanks Federal Building parking garage used by federal employees, U.S. Marshals, and the District Court. A 74% savings was realized by replacing 220 high-pressure sodium fixtures with 220 light-emitting diode fixtures.
Case study describes the U.S. Forest Service's Power-IT-Down Program, which strongly encouraged employees to shut off their computers when leaving the office. The U.S. Forest Service first piloted the program on a voluntary basis in one region then implemented it across the agency's 43,000 computers as a joint effort by the Chief Information Office and Sustainable Operations department.