Commissioning cuts energy use by 15 per cent
A new study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US has succeeded in making some important links between commissioning and energy efficiency of buildings.
It showed that the payback on commissioning was just over one year for existing buildings and around four years for new construction. The study also states that commissioning results in energy savings of about 15 per cent in new and existing buildings.
Buildings that have been properly commissioned will perform twice as well as the average building in terms of energy consumption and five times better than those subjected to a "constrained" design and installation approach, the research showed. It also concluded that commissioning leads to even better savings in high tech buildings.
The study looked at 643 buildings, representing 99 million square feet of floor space from 26 US states. It concluded that commissioning "provides risk-management and insurance for policymakers and program managers enabling their initiatives to actually meet targets, and detects and corrects problems that would eventually surface as far more costly maintenance or safety issues".
A Lawrence Berkeley statement added: "The results demonstrate that commissioning is arguably the single-most cost-effective strategy for reducing energy, costs, and greenhouse-gas emissions in buildings today."
Key findings:
* Median whole-building energy savings: 16 per cent (existing) and 13 per cent
* Median payback times: 1.1 and 4.2 years
* Median benefit-cost ratios: 4.5 and 1.1
* Cash-on-cash returns: 91% and 23%
* Very considerable reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions were achieved, at a negative cost of -$110 and -$25/tonne CO2-equivalent.
* High-tech buildings are particularly cost-effective, and saved large amounts of energy and emissions due to their energy-intensiveness.
* Projects employing a comprehensive approach to commissioning attained nearly twice the overall median level of savings, and five-times the savings of projects with a constrained approach.
* Non-energy benefits are extensive and often offset part or all of the commissioning cost.
* Limited multi-year post-commissioning data indicate that savings often persistent for a period of at least five years.
"Uniformly applying our median whole-building energy-savings value to the stock of US non-residential buildings yields an energy-savings potential of $30 billion by the year 2030, and annual greenhouse gas emissions reductions of about 340 megatons of CO2 each year," the research team added. "An industry equipped to deliver these benefits would have a sales volume of $4 billion per year and support approximately 24,000 jobs."