FROM THE EDITOR

One of the more intriguing sessions in the High Performance Buildings track at this week’s National Facility Management and Technology show in Baltimore (if you’re not here, why not? It’s free!) is about how energy models can be tools for high performance buildings, both new and existing.

If you’re old school, you’re probably thinking, “But aren’t energy models those fancy computer what-have-yous that architects and engineers use to cover their butts and dramatically over-design building systems?” Maybe in the past that was true to some extent, but not anymore.

Today, the term “energy model” is applied to encompass a wide variety of programs that can do everything from whole-building modeling in the design phase to evaluating the energy impact of choices of particular pieces of equipment in one zone of a building…and everything in between.

If you’ll agree that one of the aspects of making a building high-performance is understanding and analyzing how building systems work together, then you can see how using software to help you analyze those relationships can be beneficial. The most oft-cited example of this — whether for new or existing buildings — is determining how a lighting upgrade may influence the amount of HVAC energy used. But using an energy model to calculate how your reflective roof can reduce peak energy use, or how using occupancy sensors in a garage can reduce lighting load, or how experimenting with setpoints in different spaces can impact energy use at different times of the day can be the first step to squeezing out every last kilowatt-hour possible in your high-performance building.

As computing power has increased exponentially over the last dozen years or so, facility managers can easily take advantage of some of the benefits energy models can offer now. Many energy modeling programs — like the Department of Energy’s EnergyPlus — are available for free. And you don’t need an advanced degree in computer science to use them. Most are relatively simple and intuitive.

As always, I’m interested to hear from you. Have you used energy modeling to evaluate choices in existing buildings? What were the results?
 

Cheers,

Greg Zimmerman, editor  

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