Uh-Oh National Building Energy Statistics Bite

How often statistics are applied and misapplied. About the current obsession with getting the building certified “green”. About environmental organizations rushing to write rules that are not fully understood by the authors. There is a science and a math to building that is being glossed over in the rush to get GREEN. yikes.

My pet peeve is the often mentioned building energy savings in terms of percent of dollar expenditure. For example, they claim that “this building is efficient and will save 25% in gas and electricity bills” over the efficiency required by law. The way this rule is written, if the price of the energy commodity changes, then the bills and hence, the savings changes.

Owners will see this and ask why our cost savings predictions are so far off! Eh? I could get sued!

This might puts us engineers and architects into the role of economists to predicting prices. We would have to specialize in fortune-telling!

We should tell the truth and always say it will use some 25% less GAS and electric WATTAGE than a building designed to merely pass the state and local building energy codes.

In November’s ASHRAE Journal, there is an excellent article by a respected building scientist amd regular contributor/writer , Joseph Lstiburek. He points . It seem there is a certain laxness in the way the rules were written for the “Energy and Environment points” in LEED certification. Lstiburek points out that the ordinary “standards of care” in HVAC design are now to be certified as a wonderful advancement. Oy!

I pride myself on designing to exceed the ordinary standards by wide margins. The LEED points were being given for merely “hitting the targets of ” . I was doing that 29 years ago when I first learned how to design air and water side economizers wherever it was feasible to do so. I enjoy finding operating savings like that not so coincidentally, my clients at TOLK get more than the ordinary energy savings.

Then there is the issue of how to measure energy. Recently a comparative analysis had inconsistencies and here they seem to be exposed.
Joseph Lstibureks ASHRAE article Its the Energy Stupid”

Tags: Energy