Allan Chen, [email protected]

Energy-efficient technologies don’t start saving money and reducing energy consumption until people start using them. The research and development of new technologies isn’t complete until they are put into practice.

That’s where the Department of Energy’s Rebuild America program comes in, with the help of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s scientists and consultants, among others. Rebuild America helps communities create partnerships to make energy-efficiency improvements that help save money and revitalize buildings.

Rebuild America focuses on five areas — schools; colleges and universities; state and local governments; public and multi-family housing; and commercial buildings — and the program has more than 500 community partners in every state of the union.

Between 1995 and 2002 DOE invested $51.5 million in the program, resulting in the renovation of more than 500 million square feet of building space; additional projects amounting to 570 million square feet have been committed or are underway. Rebuild America estimates that its work is saving $131 million dollars annually in energy costs (9 trillion BTUs); through the end of 2002, the program leveraged a capital investment of $600 million.

When Rebuild America representatives encounter questions that require more in-depth technical assistance than they can provide, they refer partners to expertise in DOE’s national laboratory system. Most technical assistance is provided by Rebuild’s business partners and by three national labs: Pacific Northwest, Oak Ridge, and by the Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) at Berkeley Lab.

Rick Diamond, a scientist in EETD, who manages the Rebuild America Program at the Lab, spends a considerable amount of time working to help communities that need technical assistance on energy-efficient retrofits. Barely a week goes by when he isn’t working on one Rebuild America request or another.

“Today I’ve been working with the City of East Palo Alto, California, to identify bulletproof, energy-efficient street lighting fixtures,” Diamond said recently. The previous week, he’d been facilitating a workshop on energy-efficient multifamily housing in Kansas City, Missouri.

“We respond to about 50 to 60 calls per year for design assistance referred to us from Rebuild,” says Diamond. “The help we provide can range from a simple telephone call, to referrals to papers, web sites and design guides, to teaching design workshops, to spending a week or two working with a design team planning a retrofit project.”

Usually requests are assigned to specific labs by geography or because of special expertise. Diamond’s Berkeley Lab colleagues have helped Rebuild America bring energy-efficient design to major public buildings, schools, and housing projects; have reviewed specifications for energy-efficient systems in public buildings; and have taught workshops on energy-efficient design for the public, community officials, and architects.

Diamond adds that design assistance includes “helping the client understand what kind of savings it is possible to achieve through energy efficiency in their project, and acting as a resource to the design team, helping them use energy modeling programs, for example.”

Diamond counts 24 people in EETD or Berkeley Lab’s Facilities Department who have worked on Rebuild technical assistance or related projects recently, including Hashem Akbari, Dariush Arasteh, Doug Avery, Owen Bailey, Vlado Bazjanac, Allan Chen, Rick Diamond, Liz Exter, Chuck Goldman Steve Greenberg, Nicole Hopper, Judy Jennings, Saki Kinney, Jim Lutz, Nance Matson, Laura McLaughlin, Evan Mills, Erik Page, Mary Ann Piette, Francis Rubinstein, Dale Sartor, Michael Siminovitch, Haider Taha, and Charles Williams.

Here are a few of the Rebuild America projects to which Berkeley Lab staff has lent a hand:

Rehabilitating the Oakland Housing Authority’s multifamily housing

The Oakland Housing Authority (OHA) provides housing for low-income residents of this California city. More than 48,000 residents live in OHA-owned units, or in units supported by rental assistance.

Oakland Housing Authority architect David Brown shows Rick Diamond (right, in cap) and his UC Berkeley architecture students the newly renovated public housing at Lockwood Gardens, Oakland, California. Photo: Judy Monnier, OHA.

“We have been providing design specifications for improving the energy efficiency of ventilation and of HVAC systems to OHA for the rehabilitation of old units,” says Diamond. (HVAC stands for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.) This has been an ongoing project for several years.

In 2002, OHA won Rebuild America’s Energy Champion Award for Partnership of the Year — recognized for its progress in saving energy and money by making energy efficiency improvements in 242 of its 267 sites. More than 2,290 units at 18 sites received energy-efficiency improvements in common areas, like new fluorescent lighting, energy-efficient boilers, and Energy Star® washing machines and dryers. The total annual utility savings is expected to be about $362,000.

Helping cities and states with energy-efficient lighting

Energy-efficient lighting is often at the top of the list in retrofit projects. Berkeley Lab staff has assisted cities with a great variety of lighting projects. Berkeley Lab researcher Judy Jennings responded to a request from Rebuild Hawaii about occupancy sensors.

“Their question was whether occupancy sensors reduced the life of energy-efficient compact fluorescent lamps. I put together a brief study and a spreadsheet for them answering the question.” Says Jennings, “Occupancy sensors help save so much money on lighting energy that the effect overwhelms other factors, such as a slight decrease in lamp life.”

Traffic lights provide another opportunity for cities to save money, reducing energy use as well as maintenance costs. Owen Bailey, a graduate student who is working with the Environmental Energy Technologies Division and who spent summer 2002 at the Lab, is helping the City of San Antonio, Texas, evaluate the economics of installing solid-state traffic lights based on LEDs (light-emitting diodes). In addition to using much less energy, these lights are longer-lived than incandescent models, saving substantially on maintenance costs.

Traffic lights using LEDs instead of incandescent bulbs repay their higher initial costs with lower energy costs and fewer bulb replacements.

“San Antonio was looking for a review of their financial analysis and an estimate of the payback period, or some other financial measure,” says Bailey, currently a graduate student at Cornell University’s Environmental Systems Group, in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. “I prepared a payback spreadsheet calculator to allow them to insert their own estimates of certain values, such as components of the electricity tariffs and the labor costs involved with traffic signal maintenance. The payback period would then be updated based on the input values they selected.”

Bailey also set up a spreadsheet to compute the net present value of the project (a financial measure of all the future savings from the lights, as though they were accrued immediately), phasing in LED signals over five years for all intersections, and calculating benefits over 14 years.

The minimum savings he calculated, at three percent interest, was $2.4 million. “As a finance professor said,” Bailey notes, “doing the project is like finding $2.4 million under a rock.”

A new convention center in Pittsburgh, PA

The City of Pittsburgh has built a new convention center, which will be the first facility of its kind in the United States to receive a “LEED-certified” rating by the U.S. Green Buildings Council. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design; the Green Building Rating System™ is a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings.

Pittsburgh’s new David Lawrence Convention Center is the first of its kind to be certified as a Green Building leader in energy and environmental design.

The completed David Lawrence Convention Center facility opened at the end of April 2003. Its features include natural ventilation, extensive use of day lighting, and other energy-efficiency measures, as well as water-saving technologies.

Berkeley Lab scientist Vladimir Bazjanac responded to a Rebuild America request for assistance with the lighting design of the center. Bazjanac went to Pittsburgh and conducted an analysis at the site using a scale model of the design. Then, because “the building’s geometry is so complicated that it was very difficult to model,” says Bazjanac, “we used DOE-2 to create a model of energy use in the building.”

DOE-2 is building-energy simulation software developed by Berkeley Lab researchers. Using it, Bazjanac created a shading system for the main entry area and the exhibit hall that would reduce cooling load and provide protection from glare in one of the exhibit halls. He passed the results along to the facility’s architect, Rafael Vinoly Architects P.C.

Training America in energy-efficient design and retrofitting

There is a real thirst for information about how to lower energy bills through energy-efficient retrofit measures and improved operations. One of Berkeley Lab’s most active areas for Rebuild America technical assistance is setting up training programs.

“We provide training seminars for Rebuild America partners all over the United States,” said Berkeley Lab’s Doug Avery, on a recent rare visit to his office between training and consultation trips. “Rebuild seminars range from a full day to focused half-day sessions and cover energy-efficient lighting, appliances and office equipment, HVAC systems, the building envelope, financing — the gamut of issues that you are likely to run into during an energy-efficiency retrofit project.”

A Rebuild America seminar for commercial building professionals in Reno, Nevada

Avery initiated and developed the Rebuild Business Partners and now manages the program. “Rebuild America has over 150 Business Partners, who have allowed us to tap into their expertise and staff to provide speakers at these seminars,” which attract anywhere from 25 to 200 people. Depending on the needs of the Rebuild America partner, the audience can include business owners, local government officials, utility staff, electricians, school officials, facility managers and operators, managers of low-income housing, and the general public.

Avery has worked with utilities such as Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric, and with the cities of Houston, Texas, Henderson, Nevada, and Boise, Idaho. One seminar, to address problems with aging prisons, was hosted by the Tennessee Department of Corrections.

Last year, Avery organized 14 seminars, and “this year we expect to do between 50 and 70.” Of his crowded schedule, Avery says, “The high demand for these seminars is both gratifying and fearsome.”

Reviewing energy-efficiency plans and contracts for Rebuild Partners

Facilities ranging from community-owned to commercial have a relatively new tool for making energy-efficiency improvements: the energy-savings performance contract (ESPC), implemented by an energy service company.

“The ESPC is a way of making energy-efficient improvements to a facility and paying for it out of future energy savings,” says Berkeley Lab researcher Nance Matson. “It’s a way to leverage more energy savings than through a normal procurement process.”

An energy service company implements the energy efficiency measures, then takes its payment from the client over the next several years. If the measures provide, say, a 20-percent savings in the energy bill, the client pays a percentage of the money saved until the energy service company’s fee is settled.

Matson has developed a model “request for quotes” (RFQ) and “request for proposals” (RFP), which Rebuild’s community partners can customize to do their own solicitations for energy service company services. The models provide screening criteria to help a request-issuing community rank the quality of the responses.

The model RFP/RFQ is helping spread the ESPC throughout the U.S. as a tool for getting energy-efficient retrofits done and making it easy for any community to use ESPCs — a contracting tool that is still unfamiliar to many local governments.

Charles Williams is a Berkeley Lab engineer who works in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division’s Applications Team, a group that focuses on demonstrating advanced energy-efficient technology in the field. Williams’ Rebuild role is that of reviewer.

“I have reviewed energy efficiency master plans, commenting on the technical merit of their approaches to providing efficiency for municipal facilities,” he says. “I’ve also commented on RFPs for particular types of services for municipalities, and proposals sent to municipalities by energy service companies…. This involves looking at both technical and contract issues: Is it a good financial deal for the municipality? What are the terms of contract? Are there adequate guarantees?”

Recently, Williams has worked with the cities of Henderson, Nevada, and Richmond, California, on RFP solicitations. Another continuing role for Williams and several other Rebuild specialists has been providing technical review to the Energy Office of Berkeley, California, the Lab’s host town, on their energy efficiency plans (see sidebar).

Rebuild America’s Business Partners include a large number of energy service companies. Berkeley Lab’s Charles Goldman and Nicole Hopper develop and maintain a large database of projects completed by these companies — more than 2,300 project representing $3 billion in investment — which they can use to track and analyze market and industry trends.

Goldman and Hopper sit on the Accreditation Committee of the National Association of Energy Service Companies, which accredits performance contractors by reviewing project and company information. Their analyses of savings, costs, and economics of performance-based projects help Rebuild America better understand the impact of energy service companies on energy use in the U.S.

Other programs complete the cycle

The assistance rendered by Berkeley Lab to Rebuild America is only one of several DOE energy-efficiency programs that benefit from Lab expertise. Berkeley Lab researchers also work with the Federal Energy Management Program, which helps federal facilities improve their energy efficiency and reduce energy bills, and with DOE’s Build America program, which focuses on new construction.

Energy Star, a joint program of DOE and Environmental Protection Agency, has received technical assistance from Berkeley Lab researchers in developing voluntary guidelines and labels for energy-efficient products and buildings. Lab researchers also work with numerous state and local agencies throughout the U.S., including the California Energy Commission and the New York State Energy Research and Development Administration.

This work helps complete the cycle that begins with research and development. It doesn’t end until consumers, businesses, and industries benefit from putting energy efficiency into practice.

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