We, in the energy industry, have long used engineering calculations, aided by simple linear regression models, to estimate the energy saving potential of proposed interventions. However, as data sensors become increasingly ubiquitous and data storage costs continue to decline year over year, a shift away...
Many of us who work with commercial and industrial facilities are familiar with utility programs that pay cash incentives to encourage energy efficiency projects. The more energy you save from an eligible retrofit, the more cash incentive the utility will pay you—usually with a cap...
I’ve written before about the special challenges of benchmarking lab buildings’ energy usage. It’s always been worth the extra effort, but I’m happy to report that we’ve finally made lab benchmarking a little bit easier. It’s my great pleasure to introduce the brand new Lab...
At kW Engineering, we create a lot of detailed building models to characterize the energy use of new and existing buildings, which can be a time and effort-intensive task. With recent advances in building energy modeling tools, modelers now have a code-based access point that...
A few years ago, I helped put together an I2SL guide for facilities staff who find themselves conducting energy projects in lab buildings – a daunting prospect for many! The guide contained a host of strategies for helping retrofit projects proceed successfully and to the...
I think that the energy efficiency industry needs a big wake-up call around changes that are coming to the world of refrigerants. In last week’s post, I discussed how these changes are going to hit the commercial refrigeration market. But the coming changes to HVAC...
California is often on the “bleeding edge” of environmental policy, a position that is frankly part of the reason why I live here. But sometimes, that stance can be painful and put local businesses in a position where they need to bear the brunt of...
SkySpark collects and stores data from any number of sources and provides an open analytics platform that can be programmed to automatically make sense of the data and provide insights on a building or a portfolio of buildings. This open platform can be customized to a...
On January 1st of 2020, new changes go into effect for Title-24, California’s energy efficiency standard for commercial buildings. Neil Bulger has a nice summary of changes to HVAC, and a bit on lighting. But what’s happening with refrigeration in supermarkets? There are two important changes...
You created a regression model of your building’s energy use and now want to use its predictive capabilities. How do you go about assessing your model’s predictive power? As I mentioned in an earlier post, you want to steer away from focusing on a singular...