Overview
Commercial Building Energy Saver (CBES), intended use for small- to medium-sized office and retail buildings in California, provides energy benchmarking and three levels of retrofit analysis considering the project goal, data availability, and user experience. CBES offers prototype building models for seven building types, six vintages, in 16 California climate zones and roughly 80 energy conservation measures (ECMs) for lighting, envelope, plug-in equipment, HVAC, and service hot water retrofit upgrades. CBES Preliminary Retrofit Analysis utilizes the DEEP database, a data bank for screening and evaluating retrofit measures for commercial buildings generated from 10 million building energy simulations conducted using EnergyPlus on the U.S. National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) supercomputer. CBES Detailed Retrofit Analysis employs advanced automated calibration algorithms to attune inputs prior to simulating energy savings of ECMs. For the detailed retrofit analysis, on-demand energy simulations using OpenStudio and EnergyPlus calculates the energy performance of the building with user configurable ECMs. CBES is flexible enough that the user can jump to any level of evaluation, after the common inputs are provided. For those who wish to extend beyond California, a national version can be found at CBESPro.lbl.gov or the 2030 Districts. CBES targets broad audience including building owners, facility managers, energy managers, building operators, energy auditors, designers, engineers and consultants.
City Buildings, Energy, and Sustainability (CityBES), a web-based data and computing platform focusing on energy modeling and analysis of a city's building stock to support district or city-scale efficiency programs, is developed using CBES as the underlying simulation engine. CityBES won a 2022 R&D 100 Award. CityBES is available at CityBES.lbl.gov.
- Getting Started Tutorial: PDF Video
- LBNL seminar Commercial Building Energy Saver: An Energy Retrofit Analysis Toolkit (Recording)
CBES won the 2019 R&D100 award. This award recognizes the team for enabling equitable access to deep energy retrofit and zero-net energy strategies for small- and medium-sized commercial buildings.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking the energy performance of the building using ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager API and benchmark the electric load shape against peers with same building use type and size category.
Required inputs: Basic information and energy data in the Common Inputs tab, optional inputs for ENERGY STAR, and electric load and weather data for load shape benchmarking in the Benchmark tab.
Target audience: For all types of users
No- or Low-Cost Improvement
Level 1 identifies no- or low-cost operational improvements from load shape analysis using electricity and gas data
Required inputs: Basic information and Energy Data in Common Inputs tab, and Weather and Operation information in No- or Low- Cost Improvement tab.
Target audience: For all types of users
Preliminary Retrofit Analysis
Level 2 provides quick retrofit recommendations by looking up a pre-simulated database.Click the link to view the list of energy conservation measures (ECMs): Presimulation Energy Conservation Measures
Required inputs: Basic information, Energy price, CO2 emission factors, and Investment criteria in Common Inputs tab, and Upgrades in Preliminary Retrofit Analysis tab.
Target audience: For all types of users
Detailed Retrofit Analysis
Level 3 provides user configurable retrofit analysis using real-time EnergyPlus simulations.
Required inputs: Basic information, Energy price, CO2 emission factors, and Investment criteria in Common Inputs tab, and Actual building characteristics, Time of use energy rate, and User defined retrofit measures in Detailed Retrofit Anlaysis tab.
Target audience: Facility managers, engineers, and building owners with experience
Publication
Commercial Building Energy Saver: Getting Started Tutorial PDF
Commercial Building Energy Saver: An Energy Retrofit Analysis Toolkit PDF
DEEP: A Database of Energy Efficiency Performance to Accelerate Energy Retrofitting of Commercial Buildings PDF
Review of Existing Energy Retrofit Tools PDF
Automated Energy Model Calibration PDF
Commercial Building Energy Saver (CBES Flyer) PDF
Database of Energy Efficiency Performance (DEEP Flyer) PDF
Acknowledgements
This work is funded by the California Energy Commission under the Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program Award No. PIR-12-031, and the Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) Program Award No. GFO-15-308. This work is also funded by the Department of Energy under the Building Technology Office, the Small Business Voucher Program and the Technology Commercialization Fund. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. We also thank the Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) for providing the smart meter data for the load shape analysis research.
