Commercial Building Energy Use -- class overview: Energy modeling has entered commercial use and can help evaluate the impact of potential energy-saving interventions in commercial building design. The class investigates methods to create Building Information Models to enable energy analysis, use energy analysis tools and interpret their results for commercial buildings, analyze measured building performance and relate prediction to measurement, and develop guidance for owners on how to use these methods in practice.

Background: Use of For example, it is possible to quantitatively predict the impact of adding more insulation to walls or changing window energy efficiency, if the building modeling is done appropriately and consistently between the two design options.

Objectives - Class participants will:

• Investigate specific methods to use in creating a Building Information Model (BIM) to enable energy analysis programs to predict energy performance of medium sized commercial buildings. Participants will make at least three building design model alternatives that they anticipate will have different energy performance.
• Apply several commercial tools that predict building energy use. We will try to confirm the extent to which the predictions from different tools vary on about two different building models, which sometimes is dramatic. We will investigate use, strengths and limits of those energy modeling software tools.
• Analyze measured building performance and attempt to relate predicted and measured performance. We will look for the extent of any deviation between measured and predicted performance since, for a few buildings on which measured and predicted energy performance data exist, the predicted energy has a systematic optimistic bias in comparison with actual measured energy use.
• Make recommendations to an owner about methods to model the building, methods to do energy analysis, methods to collect actual energy performance data, and methods to interpret predicted and measured performance.

The class will run as a seminar in which participants investigate different issues and share with each other. There will be few formal lectures, if any. A few knowledgeable visitations will provide guidance and background. There will be no formal homework. There will be a few class milestones during the quarter and a final project presentation and report.

Prerequisites: The course requires Revit or Digital Project competence, as developed in CEE 210, 211 or 135 or with equivalent experience. It is desirable to have energy modeling experience, e.g., from prior or concurrent registration in CEE 176A, 226E or 256.

Evaluation: Class grades will be based on a few milestone submissions during the quarter, the final project and the contribution to the collective knowledge of the class.