Berkeley Lab Building Efficiency Campaign Drives $95M in Annual Energy Savings

October 20, 2020

One hundred and four U.S. companies, schools, governments, and institutions are taking their building energy savings to a new level with the Department of Energy’s Smart Energy Analytics Campaign, a four-year initiative funded through the Building Technologies Office and facilitated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to expand the use of energy management and information systems (EMIS) in commercial buildings.

The Smart Energy Analytics Campaign helped drive approximately 4 trillion BTUs of annual energy savings — enough to power more than 44,000 U.S. households for a year — reducing the campaign participants’ collective energy bills by $95 million a year. The research also enabled Berkeley Lab to create the world’s biggest collection of data on building energy analytics. This dataset represents the first real-world, large-scale body of evidence of EMIS’ value to commercial buildings.

“Buildings account for nearly 40% of the energy used in the United States, with a total bill well over $400 billion per year,” said scientist Jessica Granderson, Berkeley Lab’s research deputy of the Building Technology & Urban Systems Division and leader of Berkeley Lab’s efforts in the campaign. “Energy management and information systems are smart building analytics technologies that reveal hidden energy waste and provide predictive, optimized control. They are critical to achieving major reductions in energy use and to providing healthy, grid-interactive efficient building and energy performance transparency.”

Read the full article at the Berkeley Lab News Center

Author

Natalie Pawelski