Upgrading a chiller, installing a solar photovoltaic system, undertaking a deep whole-building retrofit—all these projects require large upfront investments and have long payback horizons even as they deliver operational savings. External funding and innovative finance may complement the use of internal capital or operating budgets to support investments. And increasingly, new metrics for value are reshaping the discussion from straight financial “return on investment” of a technology to new metrics on building asset value and achieving co-benefits such as improvements in productivity, environment, health, and resilience. Photo Credit: Michael Fleshman/Flickr
In this video, Paul Mathew, of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, describes how the U.S. Department of Energy is developing the Buildings Performance Database (BPD) to provide investors with actuarial data for the energy savings from building energy efficiency projects. The database of information includes more than 50,000 buildings.
Cynthia Adams
Executive Director
Local Energy Alliance Program – Virginia
Energy efficiency is the “low-hanging fruit” of a clean-energy economy. U.S. Department of Energy figures show that reducing energy use in the nation’s buildings by 20 percent would save some $40 billion per year in commercial buildings alone, while reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and advancing energy security. Meanwhile, efficiency projects would stimulate...
The key to unlocking the energy efficiency potential in commercial buildings is commercially attractive financing, according to a white paper, “Emerging Best Practice for Underwriting Commercially Attractive Energy Efficiency Loans,” by Anthony J. Buonicore, P.E., BCEE , QEP, managing director of Buonicore Partners. Ideally, “commercially attractive” means financing...
Measurement and verification of energy savings projects is drawing increasing attention among private- and public-sector decision-makers alike, Measurement and verification (M&V) is the process of quantifying a reduction in energy use, peak demand, greenhouse gas emissions, or some other quantity, usually resulting from a program or project. M&V is unique to activities that measure a...
Decades of experience on energy efficiency projects shows that most common efficiency investments have well-documented performance. Lighting retrofits, for example, have been widely adopted.