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Community Environmental Center Receives $3 Million DOE Grant for Innovative Weatherization Project
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Jay Ackley of CEC: A Minnesotan in Gotham
Monday, August 30th, 2010

Lack of Will on Cap & Trade Undermines Recovery and Hurts Climate, But Is There a Future for HomeStar?
Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Donna Parris: Woman of Many Lives
Monday, July 26th, 2010

Community Environmental Center and other agencies receive $12.9 million from DHCR for affordable housing weatherization
Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Community Environmental Center leads a state-of-the-art solar thermal project for the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council
Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Community Environmental Center is installing solar thermal systems in New York City
Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Community Environmental Center Welcomes JetBlue Airways to the Cool Roofs Movement
Monday, June 21st, 2010

21-year-old Spring Creek Towers resident is learning to weatherize homes
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Spring Creek Towers: A City Within The City
Monday, June 7th, 2010

Commissioning Shows Huge Energy Savings – Study

         
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009


A recent report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory indicates that Building Commissioning (the process of making building systems work properly, kind of like a super-tune-up) can save people huge amounts of energy, and is not that expensive in comparison to the savings.

CEC commissions both new and existing buildings, and it is one of the best things a building can do to realize real-world energy efficiency.  You can contact CEC’s commissioning manager, Jon Cramer, at 718 784 1444 x114 or jcramer (at) cecenter.org.

Some excerpts from the report:

Commissioning maximizes the quality and persistence of energy, cost, and emissions reductions. The process ensures that building owners get what they pay for when constructing or retrofitting buildings, provides risk-management and “insurance” for policymakers and program managers enabling their initiatives to actually meet targets, and detects and corrects problems that would eventually surface as far more costly maintenance or safety issues.

…

Key findings:

  • Median commissioning costs: $0.30 and $1.16 per square foot for existing buildings and new construction, respectively (and 0.4% of total construction costs for new buildings)
  • Median whole-building energy savings: 16% and 13%
  • Median payback times: 1.1 and 4.2 years
  • Median benefit-cost ratios: 4.5 and 1.1
  • Cash-on-cash returns: 91% and 23%
  • Very considerable reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions were achieved, at a negative cost of -$110 and -$25/tonne CO2-equivalent.
  • High-tech buildings are particularly cost-effective, and saved large amounts of energy and emissions due to their energy-intensiveness.
  • Projects employing a comprehensive approach to commissioning attained nearly twice the overall median level of savings, and five-times the savings of projects with a constrained approach.
  • Non-energy benefits are extensive and often offset part or all of the commissioning cost.
  • Limited multi-year post-commissioning data indicate that savings often persistent for a period of at least five years.
  • Uniformly applying our median whole-building energy-savings value to the stock of U.S. non-residential buildings yields an energy-savings potential of $30 billion by the year 2030, and annual greenhouse gas emissions reductions of about 340 megatons of CO2 each year. An industry equipped to deliver these benefits would have a sales volume of $4 billion per year and support approximately 24,000 jobs.