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Commissioning Existing Buildings: A Program Perspective
Abstract
Since September 2002, the Oakland Energy
Partnership's Large Commercial Building Tune-Up
Program has recruited managers and operators of
existing large commercial buildings in the City of
Oakland for program participation. The Tune-Up
Program is an aggressive effort to obtain 16.7 GWh
in energy savings in over 10 Mft2 in office,
institutional, healthcare, hotel, educational, and
retail buildings. Sponsored under the California
Public Utility Commission's 2002 Local Program
initiative, the Tune-Up program provides retro
commissioning (r-Cx) teams to help building
owners and operators thoroughly investigate the
operations and performance of their existing
building systems, identify measures that improve
energy performance, assist with measure
installation and verification, and provide
documentation to operators on optimum system
performance.
Great importance has been placed on the initial
assessment of each building, in order to answer
important questions from the program's and
owner's perspectives. These issues include:
condition of building's systems and equipment,
amount of savings potential, skill sets of r-Cx
teams, assurance that measures will be installed,
persistence of installed measures.
This paper describes how the program recruits
buildings, assesses the potential for savings, and
assigns engineering teams. The type and size of
buildings, their HVAC and lighting configurations,
common r-Cx measures found, and their savings
are described Results for each building are
described, and the program's cost-effectiveness is
reviewed. Currently, six buildings totaling 2.8
million square feet have been recruited, for an
expected savings of approximately 2.4 GWh. This
is 14% toward our program goal.
Citation
Jump, D.; Rosillo, A.; Tahir, A. (2003). Commissioning Existing Buildings: A Program Perspective. Energy Systems Laboratory (http://esl.tamu.edu); Texas A&M University (http://www.tamu.edu). Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /5213.