{"id":46756,"date":"2018-09-10T08:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-09-10T12:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/retrofitmagazine.com\/?p=46756"},"modified":"2018-11-12T08:01:10","modified_gmt":"2018-11-12T13:01:10","slug":"audit-levels-1-2-and-3-are-changing-heres-what-you-need-to-know-to-maximize-the-success-of-your-next-retrofit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/retrofitmagazine.com\/audit-levels-1-2-and-3-are-changing-heres-what-you-need-to-know-to-maximize-the-success-of-your-next-retrofit\/","title":{"rendered":"Audit Levels 1, 2 and 3 Are Changing; Here\u2019s What You Need to Know to Maximize the Success of Your Next Retrofit"},"content":{"rendered":"
Energy audits are a cornerstone of retrofit practice and an important first step for assessing potential energy and cost savings in your building. The quality of an audit is vital to identifying useful and practical retrofits. With the release of ASHRAE\u2019s Standard 211, Standard for Commercial Building Energy Audits, which has updated ASHRAE Audit Levels 1, 2 and 3, getting the most valuable work product for your next energy retrofit just got easier.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n With mandatory energy audit programs increasing around the country, audits are in the spotlight, including their benefits and pitfalls. In cities, like New York and San Francisco, that have adopted these ordinances, there has been an influx of audit requests and many new contractors offering audit services. This has created price pressure on energy audits, resulting in highly variable audit quality.<\/p>\n The decline of audit quality and price pressure is a growing concern resulting, The idea of three audit levels, originally defined in ASHRAE\u2019s Procedures for Commercial Building Energy Audits, has been a victim of its own success. Building owners and regulators have used the concept of ASHRAE Audit Levels 1, 2 and 3. However, few dove into the exact scope of work implied by each level.<\/p>\n The intention behind defining different audit levels was to agree on standardized scopes of varying depths. The problem was that the original publication wasn\u2019t written as a standard and left a lot of room for interpretation. That \u201cwiggle room\u201d created a lot of variation among vendors and their work products.<\/p>\n The release of ASHRAE Standard 211 – 2018 was intended to bring order to the chaos of the energy audit market by giving building owners and policymakers firm guidelines about what to expect from an audit and who should conduct them, eliminating ambiguity. For industry members, it\u2019s a means of protection, so our entire field doesn\u2019t suffer from a lack of trust rooted in the shoddy workmanship of a few. As a result, the standard defines, in code-enforceable language, exactly what each level entails in terms of procedures and reporting.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a summary of what you need to know whether you\u2019re contracting for energy audits or conducting them:<\/p>\n LEVEL 1: SCOPING<\/strong> WHAT\u2019S CHANGED<\/em> The only analysis that is required under the new Level 1 definition is to sum up historical energy consumption and benchmark the site. That includes reporting the Energy Use Intensity (EUI in kBTU per square foot per year or MJ per square meter per year) of your building and a peer group of your choosing. This avoids the potential complication (and cost) of assigning numbers to savings, costs and paybacks.<\/p>\n LEVEL 2: THE BASIC ENERGY AUDIT <\/strong> In short, the audit should provide the owner the guidance he or she expects from an energy assessment.<\/p>\n WHAT\u2019S CHANGED<\/em> Most well-qualified energy auditors already do some version of this check. This requirement eliminates the worst-offending energy-savings estimates\u2014where the recommendation saves more than the base case uses. The approach also \u201cflags\u201d measures with very high savings estimates as something to double check. WHAT\u2019S CHANGED<\/em><\/a> The requirement to provide a schematic diagram of the installation is essentially another quality-control check to ensure the proposed project fits the physical requirements of the facility. This step may cause the auditor to ask questions he or she hadn\u2019t previously considered carefully, such as \u201cWill the boiler fit through the door?\u201d.<\/p>\n Wouldn\u2019t it be great if data were available for analysis, rather than in PDFs and spreadsheets all over the country?<\/p>\n One of the optional parts of the standard that is very exciting is the collaboration with BuildingSync developers (a collaboration among the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s national energy labs) to facilitate energy audit data transfer between different platforms and applications. BuildingSync<\/a> is \u201ca standard language for commercial building energy audit data that software developers can use to exchange data between audit tools.\u201d It\u2019s important to remember that BuildingSync is a language, not a tool.<\/p>\n The good folks at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., built a tool to take data from the standard\u2019s required forms and interpret it into BuildingSync-compatible code. This enables fast and easy data transfer using tools, like Asset Score, which many cities are using as the reporting plat- form for mandatory audits. Once you\u2019ve uploaded your audit data and building characteristics in Asset Score, you then can output some of that data into a draft building model for OpenStudio, the free user interface for EnergyPlus, which replaces the DOE-2 building energy simula- tion engine. OpenStudio and EnergyPlus also were developed through collaborations between the DOE\u2019s national labs, academic institutions and private firms.<\/p>\n Virtually everyone providing input to the standard development agreed on one thing: The qualifications of the energy auditor are some of the most important determinants of the value of an energy audit. The problem was nearly everyone had different ideas about who was qualified. If you asked folks who is qualified to conduct energy audits, the answer was, and I\u2019m paraphrasing, \u201cMe\u201d.<\/p>\nReasons for the Update<\/h4>\n
\nin part, from vendors who have different interpretations of the scope of work. \u201cWhat is an energy audit?\u201d becomes a critical question. The answer needs to be clearly defined. Otherwise owners can be left comparing prices from very experienced vendors who have led lots of retrofit proj- ects and deliver the entire scope of work versus an inexperienced, low-cost team that spends a short time onsite and delivers a less credible, less complete product.<\/p>\n
\nLevel 1 is all about determining savings potential at the facility. It identifies how a building performs compared to its peers; what savings potential one can address in a quick, low-level effort; and where there are likely energy-saving opportunities to investigate further. It\u2019s considered a low-cost first step or sometimes all that is appropriate for a small facility.<\/p>\n
\nLevel 1 now is largely qualitative. This level always has been tricky because the prior guidance asked for energy-saving numbers for no- and low-cost measures. It\u2019s very hard to maintain the intended limited scope and cost if you start doing calculations. So the standard has made it clear that energy-efficiency recommendations for Level 1 are purely qualitative. Auditors are only required to assign \u201chigh\u201d, \u201cmedium\u201d and \u201clow\u201d to the measure savings, cost and priority.<\/p>\n
\nLevel 2 is what most people expect when they ask for an energy audit. It requires site-specific recommendations, costs, savings and economics. It also includes important background details that help the owner determine that the auditor:<\/p>\n\n
\nLevel 2 now has a quality-control step built in. The reporting forms require the auditor report energy savings as a percent of the base-case energy use of the primary fuel the measure impacts. Essentially, it requires the most basic level of quality control: How do my savings numbers compare to the base-case energy use?<\/p>\n
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\nLEVEL 3: TRANSITION TO PROJECT DEVELOPMENT<\/strong>
\nLevel 3 is really the beginning of project development and seeks to minimize risks through more thorough analysis and measurement to improve estimated savings and costs. It\u2019s expected to run into higher costs. Level 3 generally is not recommended as a first step because it adds real cost to the project being considered. It\u2019s a step building owners wouldn\u2019t normally take unless they\u2019re pretty sure the project looks compelling.<\/p>\n
\nShort answer: not a lot. The main thing is the standard explicitly and clearly defines requirements for items, such as:<\/p>\n\n
Easier Data Transfer<\/h4>\n
Who Can Conduct Energy Audits?<\/h4>\n