by bensimon24 | Jul 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
Summary
When replacing old equipment with new equipment, it can be challenging to calculate accurate energy savings with traditional building energy modeling tools. Gathering existing HVAC system, hot water heating, lighting, and building envelope equipment specifications is a time-consuming process—and it becomes increasingly more difficult to calibrate the model to billed data when that information is not readily available.
NEO’s new “Building Vintages” feature provides a quick and simplified approach to entering building details by calibrating the model to the billed data and calculating accurate energy savings estimates.
Building Vintages
The new “Building Vintages” enhancement dials in existing building details and applies derating factors for HVAC system efficiencies, lighting controls and power density, wall and roof R-Values, and window properties. This is accomplished by independently selecting an age for the building envelope, lighting, and mechanical systems. By utilizing data from past energy codes, building type, and climate zone, NEO “vintages” decipher what may be installed, along with the respective performance, simply based on the age of the equipment. “Vintages” can be selected for the entire building to provide a reference point, and can then be dialed in for each individual space within the building. This process allows users to calibrate the model to the billed data by making just a few selections.
Fast and Accurate Energy Savings Estimates
To calculate accurate energy savings estimates from the replacement of old equipment, the inputs specified in the model must match the actual building and equipment characteristics. By providing a quick and streamlined method for dialing in existing building parameters with NEO’s building “vintages,” users can access energy savings estimates to make informed decisions based on the most cost-effective solutions. The chart below shows how accurate energy savings estimates can be visualized and proven, where the grey dashed line represents 12 months of billed data, the blue line represents the modeled existing building energy consumption, and the teal green line represents the proposed design and how the building will perform with the user-selected energy conservation measures.
This new NEO “Building Vintages” feature expedites the renovation and equipment replacement process, saves project teams time when completing an energy analysis, and allows users to make informed decisions for optimal project outcomes. To learn more about how Net Energy Optimizer can help you save on costs and energy, connect with our team today.
by bensimon24 | Jul 24, 2023 | Uncategorized
Summary
During the spring 2023 semester, we partnered with the City of Indianapolis and Purdue University’s Energy Engineering program to create a capstone design project for students to help the City plan for its goal of achieving net carbon neutrality by 2050. The students were given access and trained to use both NEO and B3 Benchmarking software tools, to organize and analyze data from 12 city-owned buildings.
The project contained three stages: benchmark the energy consumption; evaluate energy efficiency improvements; and assess renewable energy integration.
Step 1: Energy Benchmarking
The first step in the process was to benchmark the buildings, creating a baseline of energy consumption and carbon emissions. Billed data from the city-owned buildings was imported into B3 Benchmarking to identify trends, compare to peers, and rank/prioritize which buildings have the highest energy and carbon emission reduction potential. Nine of the 12 buildings were identified to have substantial energy savings potential with cost-effective options.
Step 2: Energy Efficiency
Next, the students created calibrated energy models in NEO for nine of the buildings to identify specific energy conservation measures that are the most cost-effective at reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions. Switching to LED lighting and installing occupancy and daylight dimming sensors were identified as low-hanging fruit options. Cumulatively, those improvements could provide over $538,000 of annual energy cost savings. Taking the grid CO2e emission rates into account, those energy efficiency improvements could reduce carbon emissions by 30,000 metric tons of CO2e by the year 2050. That’s equivalent to the carbon sequestered by 3,500 acres of forest annually for 27 years!
As the electric grid gets cleaner, the next substantial improvement building owners can take to reduce carbon emissions is to install electric heating systems, which is more expensive but ultimately helps achieve net carbon neutrality in the long run. However, it’s important to focus on the low-hanging fruit options first and make other improvements over time when the capital becomes available.
Step 3: Distributed Energy Resources
The last step was looking at optimal locations for solar panels. The building load curves generated from NEO can be used for sizing solar arrays and battery storage. However, is throwing solar on every rooftop the solution? In this case, looking at an entire city, we found it more productive to consider as part of a system rather than individual buildings. In a dense urban area, finding ideal locations can be challenging. However, in cases like Indianapolis, some of the densest areas present ideal opportunities for microgrids that are connected to the grid. In two areas downtown, 60 parking lots and parking garages were identified as optimal locations for two microgrids due to their large areas, proximity, and avoidance of interferences that rooftops present. The sites together total 115 MW of solar and could generate 153 million kWh of electricity annually. That would offset 1% of the total carbon emissions from transportation and building energy consumption for the entire city (compared to 2016 emissions).
Conclusion
There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. Many barriers and challenges need to be overcome with creative solutions, and every building and city needs to be viewed as a system within a system when making decisions. Buildings in cold climates present a particularly tough challenge to electrify due to energy costs and peak heating loads when the solar panels aren’t producing much energy. Considerable financial investment is required to fund both energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. And collaboration between building owners, utility providers, and city/state governments is necessary to effectively solve these issues. Finally, software tools that process vast amounts of data are needed to properly track incremental improvements over time across a vast system of sub-systems.
by bensimon24 | Jun 14, 2023 | Uncategorized
Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA)
When evaluating a new HVAC system, it is important to understand which options optimize savings and efficiency. By performing a life cycle cost analysis, a property owner can explore the initial and long-term costs associated with each system, allowing them to make the best product decision for their wallet and the environment. Let’s explore some important key performance indicators to monitor when performing an HVAC life cycle cost analysis.
Energy Cost Savings
A Life Cycle Cost Analysis is often utilized to explore the difference between initial costs and long-term costs to identify the best savings option. With this information, a decision can be made based on the projected investment in each product over its lifetime, choosing the option that will provide optimum savings overall.
Without this analysis, property owners could choose an HVAC system that will be too expensive to maintain or more expensive than necessary to achieve the same energy savings and efficiency. This analysis gives a property owner guidance to make the best energy cost savings decision for their company.
Return on Investment (ROI)
When purchasing an energy-efficient HVAC system, you can save a substantial amount of money on your energy costs, allowing you to recoup your investment faster through savings. However, the most expensive energy-efficient system may not produce an optimal result for each building. By taking into account the opportunity for return on investment, owners can choose a system that will make their money back rather than draining it over the lifetime.
Environmental Impact
Today, it has become essential to monitor energy usage as sustainability initiatives have become a focus. A life cycle cost analysis will measure energy efficiency through each system’s energy usage over time. This provides insight into the most cost-effective and environmentally friendly options. With the information provided, property owners can make complex decisions that will benefit them both in the short term and the long term.
Net Energy Optimizer Simplifies LCCA
With Net Energy Optimizer (NEO), property owners can easily perform an HVAC life cycle cost analysis to identify energy and money-saving opportunities. NEO enables you to compare up to three HVAC systems on the same building model side-by-side while holding other elements of the building constant. This allows you to save money and time on designs, optimize product selection and decision-making, and showcase a specific HVAC product with customized system characteristics. With one software, owners can model as many buildings as they want. The more models you build, the more you save.
To learn more about how Net Energy Optimizer can help you save on costs and energy, connect with our team today.
by bensimon24 | May 2, 2023 | Uncategorized
Reducing Carbon Emissions
With Local Law 97’s ambitious set of gas emission reduction goals, building owners may feel that they are carrying a heavy burden of making their properties as efficient as possible to maintain compliance. But with the right approach and technology, meeting Local Law 97’s requirements is well within reach.
Below, we will explore how energy modeling can help you reduce your emissions and achieve maximum efficiency in your buildings.
Local Law 97 & Steps to Compliance
New York City’s Local Law 97 (LL97) sets strict regulations on the number of greenhouse gas emissions allowed from buildings larger than 25,000 square feet. The law requires these buildings to reduce their emission intensity by 40% between 2024 and 2030. This means that each year, owners must find ways to reduce their building’s emissions or face financial penalties from the city.
Here are a few steps to keep in mind when assessing your plan to become compliant with LL97:
- Determine your building size: Determine if your building exceeds 25,000 feet and falls within the constraints of the regulations.
- Assess your building’s current emissions: Building owners can use energy modeling to assess current conditions and plan for the future. A thorough model will include many scenarios to capture essential nuances in building operations that have opportunities for greenhouse gas emission reduction.
- Determine how you can reduce emissions: Once you understand where your building’s energy emissions are coming from, you can identify ways to reduce them. Building owners can use energy modeling to predict energy use for different scenarios. With this information, building owners can make improvements in line with LL97 initiatives.
- Develop an emissions reduction plan: Using the information from your energy modeling analysis, develop a plan to reduce your building’s greenhouse gas emissions. This plan should include your goals, timelines, and strategies. With information from an energy model, building owners can easily create a plan to directly target inefficient energy usage.
- Implement your plan: Implement new strategies outlined within your reduction plan. This might involve making system changes, or changing your energy usage.
- Monitor and report your progress: Continue to monitor your building’s emissions annually and report your progress to the city to remain compliant. Energy modeling is able to provide owners with up-to-date reports on their gas emissions to keep reduction efforts on track and continue to identify areas for improvement.
- Stay informed: Keep up to date with any changes to the law and greenhouse gas reduction initiatives in New York City.
Energy Modeling as a Tool
Energy modeling is an invaluable tool when it comes to meeting Local Law 97 compliance requirements in New York City. Understanding how your building’s energy efficiency metrics enables you to make informed decisions about projects that will benefit your bottom line while helping to lower your greenhouse gas emissions at the same time. With access to analytics tools that drive accuracy in modeling outputs, you’ll be able to set realistic targets that comply with LL97.
NEO is an easy-to-use real-time energy modeling tool that allows building owners the opportunity to analyze a building’s performance in order to remain compliant with local laws and regulations. With accurate modeling results in seconds, building owners can interpret data points to identify areas of energy-saving opportunities. By identifying these opportunities, building owners can move towards reducing their emissions and reach Local Law 97’s ambitious energy goals. To learn more about how NEO can help you move towards Local Law 97 compliance, talk to our team today.
by bensimon24 | Jan 12, 2023 | Uncategorized
Energy Modeling
Whether you’re a commercial property owner or building engineer, the global sustainability movement along with rising costs throughout the supply chain mean it’s more important than ever to ensure your commercial buildings are running efficiently. Energy savings directly contribute to corporate profits. But it can be difficult to identify efficiency gaps or areas for improvement, especially in large commercial building plans.
Building energy modeling helps teams review, aggregate, and analyze building energy and financial data to determine life-cycle costs, comparative performance, and efficiency design and construction decisions. Manual energy modeling is a complex process that requires significant bandwidth and technical expertise. But with automated energy modeling software, users need only basic building and mechanical system information to generate a detailed model.
Commercial buildings across industries can be very complex, requiring highly contextual and accurate data to make effective changes. There are many factors that can affect the energy consumption of a commercial building, which can be even more complicated based on the building industry and use type. Because of these complexities, we’ve developed a list of the three most common energy modeling mistakes and how to avoid them so you and your team can make smarter planning and optimization decisions.
Common Mistakes
1. Limited or Ineffective Analyses
With so much data available in a robust energy model, it can be difficult to identify the most critical metrics and maximize your results. Often the first analytical mistake many teams make is only looking for large, unavoidable issues such as noncompliance with codes and regulations. But by only focusing on “must-dos” you may be missing out on critical insights for efficiency optimization and prevention of future issues.
Similarly, your team should be reviewing the model at different levels. Analyze the results from the perspective of energy consumption, costs, and long-term sustainability. In doing so, you can easily identify areas for improvement that will help you streamline inefficiencies for the short and long term.
Ultimately, a building energy model is only as valuable as its analyses. Energy modeling by hand can substantially reduce the breadth and depth of your analysis. Instead, look for an energy modeling tool that will highlight a wide range of strategies, measures, and mechanical systems to consider.
Likewise, analytics are not valuable if they aren’t relevant to you or you don’t know how to apply them to your building type or industry. Because of this, your manual or automated energy modeling tool must provide easily consumable metrics that paint a clear picture of the best next steps.
2. Reactive Maintenance
Just as it’s important to broaden your analytical perspective, it’s also critical to use energy modeling for proactive, rather than reactive, maintenance. By only leveraging ad-hoc reporting, you are grossly limiting your visibility. This makes the possibility of catching trends early to stop burgeoning issues less likely. More so, the less you run modeling reports, the fewer opportunities you have to improve your energy efficiency continually.
At NEO, we recommend standardizing a frequent cadence for energy modeling across all your buildings (yes, even smaller buildings!) to achieve maximum results. A more proactive approach sets your team up for success by setting a precedent of continuous improvement. This ensures any trends or small issues will be addressed early, further reducing the costs of necessary maintenance, upgrades, or changes.
3. Time Spent on Development & Analysis
Effectively executing an energy model is a complex process. Manually, this can take 70-100 hours and requires hours to review for quality assurance. Each change to the model representing a different efficiency measure also needs to be checked. Commercial building teams can waste significant resources energy modeling by hand, suffocating team bandwidth and increasing the risk of human error.
Automated energy modeling software can accelerate the development and analysis process and reduce time spent by 75%. Perhaps more importantly, an automated, standardized approach means your time was spent wisely since standard operating procedures minimize risk and ensure more consistent results. Designers often use an “it was a good enough decision on the last project” approach to new building development, but this approach ignores better options and can fail to keep up with evolving equipment efficiencies or incremental costs since the last project. With automated modeling, the best decisions are clearer and more consistent.
Why You Should Invest in Energy Modeling Software
Whether you’re struggling with team bandwidth, reactive maintenance, or ineffective analyses, commercial energy modeling software can help accelerate and standardize the entire process to reduce manual labor, encourage proactive analysis, and maximize reporting accuracy. Investing in energy modeling software can save your business thousands in energy costs annually.
NEO’s automated, real-time approach provides results in seconds with the accuracy of models that typically take days to produce.Our robust system provides measures for 40+ building types, 150+ HVAC systems, 250+ operational and capital improvements, dozens of baseline protocols and RS Means cost data for computing ROI. NEO specializes in optimizing any new or existing commercial, mixed-use, or multifamily building.
For property owners, architects, engineers, manufacturers, or utility managers, our tiered software subscription packages give you the option to choose the level of service that’s right for you. Schedule a demo with our team to learn how NEO can transform your commercial building development and optimize your energy efficiency and maintenance.
by dwolfwilldancom | Jan 26, 2021 | Company, Easy to Use, Fast, Uncategorized, Validated, Versatile
NEO | Net Energy Optimizer Helps Building Owners, HVAC Contractors, and Energy Professionals Tackle Energy Modeling
The software solution can help show decision makers the value of upgrades to their buildings’ systems
Challenge:
To optimize energy modeling for buildings, since modeling is a valuable tool that is underused due to traditionally being time-consuming and complicated.
Solution:
NEO leverages automation to make energy modeling easier, faster, and more accessible, regardless of building size or the contractor’s technical expertise. The NEO | Net Energy Optimizer provides an advanced technology solution that makes energy modeling more accessible, accurate, and affordable.
2021 AHR Expo Innovation Award Winner – Software: NEO | Net Energy Optimizer
SOFTWARE SOLUTION: NEO automated modeling saves time and money by reducing the number of hours it takes perform an analysis.
Product Details:
NEO uses default inputs derived from industry standards (ASHRAE, COMNET, and RS Means) to inform and automate baseline models. NEO provides results in seconds, so its automated modeling saves time and money by reducing the number of hours it takes perform an analysis and makes the design and product selection process significantly more efficient.
NEO is a web-based energy modeling tool that utilizes the DOE-2 simulation engine and provides energy conservation measure rating analyses, energy audits for existing buildings, code compliance, and more. The energy modeling software streamlines whole building analyses of HVAC systems and energy conservation measures for commercial buildings with the versatility to support product comparisons, existing building energy audits, and new construction from early design through construction.
“With evolving construction technology, more stringent building codes, and limited project resources, the impact of design decisions continues to grow,” said Eric Flower, software account executive for Willdan. “NEO helps drive increased efficiency, reduces dependency on fossil fuels, and promotes new technologies by giving stakeholders performance-based answers to their complex product selection, building audit, or new construction design decisions.”
NEO graphically reports results, generates downloadable input/simulation files, and creates CSV and MS Word documents detailing key model inputs and outputs. NEO is web-based, touch friendly, and requires no software installation. Flower explained that NEO provides the actionable data needed to prove the energy, environmental, and financial value of a systems decision. This can help teams embrace new technologies that they may have initially dismissed due to an upfront cost.
“As the NEO user becomes a more educated consumer, supplier or consultant, a circular feedback loop influences: Designers to build more efficient buildings, operators to run them optimally, and equipment manufacturers to build more efficient systems to meet market demand,” said Flower.
“NEO has been very beneficial for the projects we’ve used it on. I’ve been able to perform early analyses and provide a professional looking report to clients, giving creditable information without a lot of upfront work. The efficiency of NEO has helped me remain profitable as it reduces the amount of work I have to do before pen hits paper.”
Brian D. Howell, PE, CxA
Farris Engineering
Finalists:
Finalists in the AHR Innovation Award Software category included Distech Controls’ Builder and Lennox International Inc.’s CORE Service App. Lennox’s CORE service app connects with its products’ CORE systems, allowing for diagnostic features that reduce service, installation, and maintenance costs.
By Gordon White
