Every building is a complex system. Seemingly inconsequential and difficult-to-identify building attributes can have an outsized impact on energy consumption, skewing our understanding of the overall building performance. So why don’t industry-standard best practices for building energy modeling account for those kinds of nuances?
After decades conducting audits, I began to ask myself this question in 2014. At the time I was managing one of two teams participating in the Department of Energy-sponsored Building Asset Rating program pilot in Massachusetts. My team’s scope of work involved conducting energy audits for 50 buildings, programming streamlined DOE-2 software simulations for each of the facilities and documenting findings in ASHRAE formatted reports. The other team of engineers mirrored our efforts so that two sets of final building energy reports could be compared and an understanding about which elements of asset-driven audits were working, and which weren’t.
It turned out that there was a lot more of the latter than the former. I realized that building energy modeling just wasn’t working, and once the veil was down it was immediately apparent why.
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