NREL Works with ASHRAE, Others to Cut Building Energy Use in Half
Hospitals use a lot of energy to save lives. In fact, they use more than 836 trillion Btu of energy every year, notes the U.S. Department of Energy. To find ways to cut the energy intensity of large hospitals as well as schools and retail buildings by half, DOE’s Commercial Buildings Program and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are working together with the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and other members of the building industry (see sidebar below).
“The Advanced Energy Design Guide [AEDG] series represents the best practices in industry for energy efficiency in buildings,” said Shanti Pless, NREL senior research engineer and AEDG project chair. “Our job is to develop those best practices, along with the professionals in the industry, and put them together in an easy-to-implement guide. NREL created the modeling and optimization software used to determine that what is going into the guides achieves a 50 percent savings goal.”