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.