San Francisco BayREN: Integrated Commercial Retrofits

Lead Performer: Association of Bay Area Governments – Oakland, CA

Partners:

-- Bay Area Regional Energy Network – San Francisco, CA

-- Business Council on Climate Change – San Francisco, CA

-- City of Berkeley – Berkeley, CA

-- City of Oakland – Oakland, CA

-- City and County of San Francisco – San Francisco, CA

-- East Bay Energy Watch – San Francisco, CA

-- Emerald Cities – Washington, DC

-- Joule Assets Inc. – Bedford Hills, NY

-- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) – Berkeley, CA

-- National Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL) – Golden, CO

-- Open Energy Efficiency – Sausalito, CA

-- Prospect Silicon Valley – San Jose, CA

-- Renew Financial – Oakland, CA

-- San Francisco Energy Watch – San Francisco, CA

DOE Total Funding: $1,398,758

Cost Share: $1,424,825

Funding Type: Solutions to Improve the Energy Efficiency of U.S. Small and Medium Commercial Buildings (DE-FOA-0001385)

PROJECT OBJECTIVE

The small and medium commercial buildings is a sector hard to reach and expensive to serve. The Association of Bay Area Governments will perform modeling analysis in nine Bay Area counties to help small and medium businesses achieve the cost-effective energy efficiency improvements. BayREN Integrated Commercial Retrofits (BRICR) project will modify and enhance existing open-source tools to perform large-scale building energy modeling analysis on commercial buildings throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. One of two paths for comprehensive efficiency improvements will be suggested for building owners, deep energy retrofit or serial upgrades integrated into capital improvement cycles. BRICR will help reduce the cost of energy efficiency targeting, design, and project development in this market.

Drawing from LBNL Commercial Building Energy Saver tool and NREL’s "Insight" large-scale simulation platform, a single online database and modeling tool will be created for performing high-level modeling on commercial buildings. The tool will allow program implementers to upload site-specific data to improve the quality of the modeled output.

PROJECT IMPACT

The project aims to create a model for using data to better target and recruit small-medium commercial buildings in existing EE programs. This will build on the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Open Studio and COFFEE approaches in order to deploy EE through both deep energy retrofits and serial upgrades.

CONTACTS

DOE Technology Manager: Charles Llenza

Lead Performer: Association of Bay Area Governments