Multifamily Energy Efficiency Initiative Developing Next Practice Energy Efficiency Options

Transcription

1 Multifamily Energy Efficiency Initiative Developing Next Practice Energy Efficiency Options Initiative Work Plan October 2012

2 Introduction The carbon emissions associated with electricity generation and natural gas fuel consumption in the building sector represent the largest category of contributions to greenhouse gas emissions in this country. At the same time, the cost of operating buildings is needlessly inflated by inefficient building characteristics and poor operating practices that represent a significant waste of resources. It is widely recognized that significant improvements can be made to the way we design, maintain and operate buildings, reducing building energy use by 50% or more. Although examples are becoming more frequent in the commercial and singlefamily building sectors, the multifamily sector lags behind in terms of both projects demonstrating significant savings and programs and tools to encourage savings strategies. At the same time, only a scattering of utility programs directly address energy savings in the multifamily sector. NBI proposes to develop a meaningful whole-building energy performance improvement tool for new and existing multifamily buildings, and a strategy to engage both a market audience and major utilities in the implementation of programs to deploy the tool in the marketplace. Although examples are becoming more frequent in the commercial and single-family building sectors, the multifamily sector lags behind in terms of both projects demonstrating significant savings and programs and tools to encourage savings strategies. In the course of this project, NBI will develop whole-building efficiency technical guidance modeled after a similar new commercial building incentive program developed by NBI (Advanced Buildings Core Performance ), and currently supported by a coalition of 10 utilities, states and conservation agencies nationwide. Work on this program will also dovetail with an ongoing project of NBI to develop comparable tools for deep energy retrofits in existing small commercial buildings (under 50,000 sf), which make up over 95% of the commercial building stock in this country. This existing building project is supported by grants from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Kresge Foundation. NBI s model of program development is to bring in multiple utility organizations to share the relatively significant technical development costs, making program development more cost effective for each organization. At the same time, participating utilities have appreciated the opportunity to work as a group in marketing and communication to the industry, bringing advantages of scale to implementation of the program. NBI will recruit five large utilities to support development of the program and develop strong market connections between these utilities and key multifamily owner and interest groups to support broadscale implementation of the program. To start down this road in the multifamily sector, this project has six distinct tasks to develop a program which can be implemented at the utility level. Although listed sequentially, elements of these tasks overlap in timing and duration. Multifamily Energy Efficiency Initiative 1

3 Task One: Partner Outreach and Development Work with MacArthur to identify sector partners Recruit utility partners Establish technical advisory group The first task in this project will be to build a strong coalition of partners interested in energy performance improvements in the multifamily sector. This coalition will include a number of key utilities around the county who are in a position to support and implement energy performance improvements to this sector as an extension of existing energy efficiency acquisition programs (referred to as demand-side management, or DSM programs). NBI will also recruit coalition partners from national organizations that represent multifamily owners and tenant groups, local government programs and from groups with practical experience in working with multifamily. The group will advise the development of the technical tools and provide a better understanding of how these tools can support and integrate with successful implementation of efficiency programs. Task Two: Program and Tool Research Identify existing programs and research Characterize sector energy use and tools Although we believe the multifamily sector is significantly underserved in the area of energy performance improvement programs, there are existing tools and programs that address multifamily energy in some markets. It will be important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of these existing resources as we move to develop a program that is more comprehensive in scale. In Task Two we will identify tools and programs currently in use and explore the technical characteristics and implementation strategies of today s approaches. Lessons from these tools and programs will serve to inform and strengthen our efforts. It is anticipated that this task will also identify key partners who may want to participate further in program development and implementation. As part of Task Two, we will also examine the availability of performance data on multifamily energy use. Because successful improvement in building energy use requires that occupant and operational characteristics be accounted for, the ability to compare performance among buildings and to track ongoing performance are important components of this program. However, data on energy use in the multifamily sector is difficult to come by. We currently have access to some repositories of this data. It is also anticipated that MacArthur will have connections in the industry that may allow us to access broader databases of multifamily building energy performance. This information will be used in conjunction with our technical analysis to help identify and validate key performance improvement strategies in the development of tools and program features. Multifamily Energy Efficiency Initiative 2

4 Task Three: Identify Target Building Prototypes Market characterization work; regional, technical, physical configuration Consulting and review by national players Identify partner priorities for regions, configurations, sectors A key aspect of this project will be identifying building prototypes that can be used to represent a significant percentage of the multifamily building stock and that represent meaningful and approachable targets for energy performance improvement. These prototypes will be used to evaluate and describe the effectiveness of the energy efficiency strategies proposed. Preliminary research suggests that three or four building prototypes are representative of a significant percentage of the multifamily sector. However, regional and economic criteria may also suggest different prototype configurations or variations to address the priorities of specific utilities and other groups. Therefore, final prototype selection, including the balance between new construction and existing buildings, will include these considerations as well as overall representation in the building stock. From an implementation perspective, scalability requires that program strategies are predictable and repeatable across many individual buildings. Analysis of characteristics and solutions of each individual building is costly and time consuming. Instead NBI proposes to use prototypes to represent segments of the market in the technical analysis we will conduct of the effectiveness of efficiency measures and strategies. Solution sets generated in this way are considered applicable to a wide range of projects with characteristics similar to the prototype. Using multiple prototypes allows for some customization of the program to individual building characteristics in the implementation phase. Prototypes also allow program managers to successfully target specific building and market characteristics in recruiting program participants. Prototype identification will be a specific step in this project, and final selection of multifamily prototypes will be influenced by goals and priorities of utility and foundation funders of this project. The number of prototypes we can include in the analysis will also be dependent on the level of participation we achieve from utility funders. Preliminary efforts in this regard suggest that suburban style walkup apartments and mixed use buildings with a couple floors of residential over ground level commercial might represent two of the meaningful range of prototypes in the multifamily sector for consideration. Task Four: Measure and Bundle Analysis Measure identification Sensitivity and impact analysis Cost and implementation issues The next step will be to analyze the anticipated energy impacts of the various strategies and measure upgrades that are being considered as part of a wholebuilding improvement package. The analysis uses energy modeling tools to: Compare the impact of a vast array of potential measure combinations Multifamily Energy Efficiency Initiative 3

5 Sort out the most promising strategies from the less effective ones Understand the interactive effects of measures adopted as packages Incorporate the influence of climate and building physical variation into the analysis This is a complex energy modeling task, but NBI has successfully used powerful batching tools to generate meaningful results from large data sets in the development of previous whole-building efficiency programs like Core Performance. It is anticipated that NBI will work with an energy modeling subconsultant on this effort. NBI has worked extensively with a number of energy modeling subcontractors on a range of different projects. We have several options, and may use different consultants for different aspects of this analysis. As part of the analysis phase, we will also develop a sensitivity analysis of the impact of various physical, operational, equipment and tenant measures on total energy performance. This analysis provides key insights into prioritization of upgrade strategies and their relationship to operational and behavioral factors in total energy performance. Addressing these aspects of energy performance represents an important approach to application of upgrade strategies to existing buildings. These aspects of building energy use represent huge savings opportunities but are typically not addressed by existing utility-based conservation programs. A third component of the analysis will be an evaluation of measure cost. It is critical to program success that a cost filter be applied to the measures we are evaluating. Costs vary significantly by region, building and strategy, and the cost filter in this case will necessarily remain fairly broad. Also, individual utilities and program managers typically apply their own individual criteria to cost analyses. Therefore the goal of this analysis will be simply to get a first order estimate of relative costs to guide measure priorities and to set up a structure for subsequent cost evaluation at the level of individual organizations. Task Five: Tool and Structure Develop tool scenarios for systematic approach to retrofit Tool development; new and existing building applications A key aspect of this work will be development of a well-considered and effective tool to deliver the program information to the marketplace. The tool needs to bring high-quality technical information about whole-building performance upgrade strategies to a wide audience in an understandable format. The tool will be designed to allow individual building owners or utility program managers to quickly identify a set of meaningful whole-building performance upgrades that are appropriate to the target building characteristics, based on the extensive technical evaluation resources developed in Task 4. It is not the intention to develop a highly customized analysis of each individual building; rather, the goal is to allow individual projects to easily identify a set of prioritized efficiency strategies appropriate to buildings similar to their own. This strategy represents a compromise between expensive, custom, building-by-building Multifamily Energy Efficiency Initiative 4

6 analysis, and overly simplified one-size-fits-all strategies. This semi-custom analysis strategy is particularly appropriate for small- and medium-scale multifamily projects. Work on this tool for the multifamily sector will leverage a similar effort by NBI currently underway for the small commercial building sector. Tool structure and functionality considerations are already being considered in the context of small commercial buildings, and the lessons from this work will support development of a multifamily tool. The final program configuration will be designed to serve both as a design guideline for new construction and as a guide for existing building retrofits. In the new construction context, the program will serve as a wholebuilding design guide that identifies a complete set of energy performance upgrades based on project type that will be part of the utility incentive program, much as the Core Performance program works today. The tool will also be designed to allow users to identify existing building characteristics that can t be modified, so that upgrades can focus on the most meaningful strategies available to existing buildings for performance improvement. Task Six: National Launch Develop communication support strategy and materials Convene partners, stakeholders, utilities and key players for national rollout summit Identify pilot implementation strategies with utilities Once development of the program is nearly complete, the partner groups identified at the beginning of the project will be reconvened for a rollout of the new tool. The purpose of this meeting will be to demonstrate program features to the groups and allow feedback on implementation strategies. The meeting will also serve to generate cooperative relationships between utility and owner groups that will foster broader implementation of deep energy retrofits in the multifamily sector. It is anticipated that a focus of this summit will also be to identify pilot project markets for specific utility implementation of the tool. In addition to the development partners and advisors, NBI will also invite other groups with interest or experience in multifamily implementation and expertise from the financial and development community to discuss how to best integrate approaches to implementation. In this task communication mechanisms to support the implementation will also be developed. These might include strategies such as: Published technical guide, Webinars, Trade press articles, Multifamily Energy Efficiency Initiative 5

7 Implementation support materials (training slide decks, written descriptive materials), Branding strategy if needed, Website and other mechanisms to support ongoing communication Evaluation and Assessment To track progress indicators, we anticipate reporting on three key phases of the work in progress and to provide a final report. The first progress report will focus on progress toward forming a meaningful coalition to support multifamily performance improvement. The second progress report will discuss the specific performance strategies identified for multifamily performance improvement and describe the findings of the analysis into how effectively these strategies can be applied to the identified prototypes. The third progress report will discuss development of the program tool for multifamily performance improvement and describe deployment options. The final report will also help set up the issues and implementation strategies to be discussed at the final summit meeting. It will synthesize all of the project reporting, and summarize the discussion and findings of the national rollout summit. This will also address the opportunities and context of market implementation strategies. Project Schedule An 18-month development timeframe is anticipated for to develop and roll-out the multifamily whole building energy performance tool. The timeline below shows the expected order and overlap of the initiative s tasks described above. Multi-Family Program Development Proposed Timeline Task Month (April 12 Sept 13) 1 Partner Outreach and Development 2 Program and Tool Research 3 Building Prototypes 4 Measure and Bundle Analysis 5 Tool and Structure 6 National Launch 7 Partner Coordination and Reports Shading indicates intensity of effort during a quarter Multifamily Energy Efficiency Initiative 6

8 Budget Total Development Cost The total development cost for this Multifamily Properties Initiative is about $500,000. That investment is planned over an 18 month period with much of the funding being allocated to cover the cost of various NBI staff that will be doing the research, development, assessment, and partner coordination required for this initiative. The pie chart shows the cost allocation for the various strategy areas within this initiative. The costs are spread over with most of the spending targeted for Some of the development costs can be adjusted as work on this initiative progresses. A few of the specific tasks can be scaled up to adjust to additional partner interest and funding commitments. Funding Partners Partners that have committed to funding this initiative include: Efficiency Vermont National Grid NYSERDA SMUD Additional partners are currently being solicited. Leveraged External Funding Initiative partner funding will be leveraged with funding that NBI already has in hand or will be receiving over the next year. Seed funding for this initiative comes from the MacArthur Foundation. Their foundation funds account for more than half of the initiative s total budget. Portions of the development costs may be offset through in-kind support from initiative partners or others. Multifamily Energy Efficiency Initiative 7