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Community Environmental Center joins Queens Library for “Greening Libraries” Project
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Weatherization Funding: Surviving by the Skin of Our Teeth, by Alexis Greene
Friday, December 23rd, 2011

Luck of the Irish – A Winner of the CEC Raffle
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Want to create jobs? Consider an Energy Corps, by Richard Cherry
Friday, December 9th, 2011

Community Environmental Center Installs Solar Thermal System at JCC on Staten Island
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

Community Environmental Center Is LEED Consultant for LEED Gold Dormitory at Queens College
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

The partnership between Green City Force and Community Environmental Center, by Lisbeth Shepherd
Thursday, November 10th, 2011

Helen M. Marshall, President of the Borough of Queens, Proclaims Tuesday, November 1, Community Environmental Center Weatherization Day
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

Community Environmental Center receives Service Merit Award from NYSERDA
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

Community Environmental Center to celebrate Weatherization Day November 1
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

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.

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