The First Facility Management Blog

As part of its work, the California Energy Commission operates a Research Development and Demonstration (RD&D) Division, which oversees the Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program. The PIER program focuses on a number of energy areas, including Building Efficiency. This research aims to decrease building energy use by developing or improving energy-efficient technologies, strategies, tools, and building performance evaluation methods.

Periodically, PIER will publish informational briefs based on its research, which is often conducted with a variety of organizations with funding from the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program. The briefs are written and prepared by E Source.

PIER recently released a brief on research on the efficiencies of various types of uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) for data centers under a variety of operating conditions. The study, titled “Uninterruptible Power Supplies: A Data Center Efficiency Opportunity,” also proposed an efficiency label for UPSs and estimated the current energy use of the existing stock of UPSs and the potential savings if efficiency standards were in place.

Collaborators on the project included Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its subcontractors, EPRI Solutions, and Ecos Consulting.

The report can be downloaded free of charge at this link. Registration required.

As part of its work, the California Energy Commission operates a Research Development and Demonstration (RD&D) Division, which oversees the Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program. The PIER program focuses on a number of energy areas, including Building Efficiency. This research aims to decrease building energy use by developing or improving energy-efficient technologies, strategies, tools, and building performance evaluation methods.

Periodically, PIER will publish informational briefs based on its research, which is often conducted with a variety of organizations with funding from the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program. The briefs are written and prepared by E Source.

PIER recently released a brief about commissioning with a monitor-based appproach. The document, “Savings Persist with Monitoring-Based Commissioning (TB-39),” shows how monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx), a program approach that combines permanent building-energy-system monitoring with standard retrocommissioning practices, can provide substantial, persistent energy savings.

A pilot program conducted at 25 California university campuses demonstrated that MBCx has the ability to:

• Reduce peak-period electricity use and total annual energy use;
• Trend and benchmark building-performance data continuously;
• Catch problems with control systems that are normally hard to detect; and
• Identify cost-effective retrofit opportunities.

MBCx can be used in commercial and institutional buildings with energy information or energy management systems that are capable of trending building energy use.

To download the two-page report from PIER free of charge, visit this link…