Whole Building

Whole Building

Whole Building

Commissioning, Operation, Real-time Monitoring and Evaluation of Pilots
This project aims to promote the adoption of U.S. Building Commissioning Standards and Guidelines in China; document the benefits and return on investment of building commissioning; ensure that CERC-BEE demonstrated technologies work properly and are integrated with the rest of the building systems; and develop guides to help U.S. companies to adapt to China's building commissioning market.
Read more: Research Summary File

Graphic of Building equipment flowEnergy Systems and Technology for Demonstration Projects


Researchers at Berkeley Lab and Tianjin University (China) have developed a Web-based tool to make a simple investment and planning version of DER-CAM for the optimization and control of building equipment and microgrids. The model, called WebOpt, is freely available on the web and has a Chinese language interface. There are over a hundred users applying the Chinese version. DER-CAM is currently being extended to optimize overall building control using a cloud tool that optimizes the operation of complex buildings as a software service. This integrated approach has been demonstrated to lower energy costs by 30% at a University of New Mexico campus building, which implements the optimized schedules directly in its building energy management system. The demonstrations is being extended to 4 additional NM buildings, and one on the Tianjin University campus. Plans are to use the same technology in future MOHURD demonstration buildings.

Key Technical Achievements

  • Real time strategies for cost and peak load reduction
  • Comparative research on energy use of U.S. and Chinese high efficiency buildings

 

Participants

Berkeley Lab
Tianjin University