Class overview 2010: Energy prediction and monitoring has entered commercial use and can help evaluate the impact of potential energy-saving interventions in commercial building design and operation. First taught in 2009, this 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 both for commissioning and new design.

Background: in 2009, students looked at stated Y2E2 building objectives for energy system and component performance and compared them with quantitative predictions and measured values obtained from the online monitoring system. Findings of the class study included that students with no prior background could successfully access and interpret measured energy performance data from the data acquisition computer; overall building energy use met code objectives but dramatically exceeded initial design objectives; some HVAC components and systems worked well and others did not work as planned, and a gifted set of students together worked about a thousand hours to interpret only about ten percent of the available data, which strongly indicates that the current process to access and interpret data is not sufficiently routine and automated to allow effective continuous energy system commissioning on a significant commercial scale.

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 predict impacts of building design model design or operating alternatives, start to learn the strengths and limitations of current prediction methods in practice, and when possible, verify the impacts of their choices in practice.
• Reexamine the building systems investigated in the past year to see if the performance of individual components, systems and spaces has changed.
• Analyze monitored building performance and attempt to relate intended, predicted and measured performance. We will look for the extent of any deviation between intended, predicted and measured and make conjectures about possible explanations for any deviations.
• Attempt to confirm or disconfirm conjectures about any observed discrepancies between intended, predicted and measured performance, working with building operators to observe component behavior and make changes when possible and appropriate.
• 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 intended, 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.