Sustainability Support

Background

Concerns about climate change and sustainability are now in the mainstream. As resources become scarce and energy delivery infrastructure lags behind growth, sustainability has the potential to impact your business. There is great opportunity to improve energy performance of existing buildings and equipment as a step toward both reducing the need for greater infrastructure and reducing these adverse impacts. As firms dig deeper into energy related sustainability, QuEST can provide guidance on the best investments and performance-monitoring to ensure these investments are delivering the right return.

While many engineering firms can perform studies and make estimates of potential energy savings, QuEST has the unique capability to integrate engineering and statistical disciplines to improve savings estimates and make greater use of available data (e.g. EMS or BAS data) to identify ways to improve building performance. To be clear, energy performance is not simply a matter of totaling the use of the multiple pieces of energy-consuming equipment, but the ability to understand how the energy use relates to myriad variables, such as weather, occupancy, and production. It also includes the relationship of energy use and demand to equipment type and capacity, system type and building size.

QuEST brings expertise in synergistically combining data from a variety of sources to understand and track building energy performance over time, and using the ongoing data collection to identify opportunities for energy savings without reducing the services provided by the systems. After improvements are implemented, QuEST can use the performance tracking to identify any modifications to the improved performance and continuously search for further opportunities to reduce energy use and cost.

QuEST engineers are corresponding members of ASHRAE Technical Committee 7.6 for Systems Energy Utilization.

Use of Software Tools for Performance Tracking

The software we commonly use at QuEST is described under Resources, but we are also familiar with most energy performance tracking tools available in the marketplace. We keep abreast of research in this area, and have been awarded utility and state contracts to contribute to that research, including a current (November 2009) 3-year contract to develop easy-to-use M&V and performance tracking tools for public use.

Many of the commercially available tools are good for users who have time for further analysis, but they fail to automate common analyses, and don't provide "actionable" information. QuEST expands the capabilities of these tools with further automated analyses, and maximizes the actionable information from the available data.