I Introduction
The Penn Sustainability Plan began as part of Penn’s determination to improve its environmental performance. Much of the initial focus was on energy usages and costs, but the initial study inquired broadly about environmental indicators and effects, from water use to transportation to health. The first phase of the project commenced in the 2005-06 academic year with four broad components:
- Develop overall campus sustainability goals
- Develop environmental audit strategies for campus buildings and procedures
- Conduct a comprehensive energy audit for selected buildings and produce calibrated performance simulation models for these buildings
- Identify strategies for achieving campus sustainability goals
The work of Phase I provided a preliminary analysis of the University’s overall environmental performance, identified major performance indicators, and developed sustainability goals for the campus. The much more demanding task of auditing and evaluating individual campus buildings was subsequently elaborated into two additional phases to be conducted over two years.
Phase II, of which this report is a summary, extended over the 2006-07 academic year and produced energy audits of about a third of the buildings on campus. Since campus buildings are not individually metered for heating and cooling, a new web-based tool was developed and calibrated to estimate the energy consumption of individual buildings– Building Performance Assessment Toolkit Plus (BPAT+). The tool is aimed at facilitating strategic energy planning for the campus and is conceived, in the absence of metering, as a possible replacement for the current cost allocation model.
Phase I concluded with four recommendations, of which the second became the primary task for Phase II and III. The explanation of that recommendation is reproduced here to introduce this report:
Perform BPAT audits on all campus buildings to identify performance improvement strategies
Penn does not currently meter individual buildings for heating and cooling, or sub-meter them for electrical usage, allocating utility costs to the schools according to a crude model that does not accurately reflect the energy usage of individual buildings. For the purposes of identifying and
evaluating successful performance improvement strategies for the campus for it is imperative that the University develop more precise and useful information about the energy performance characteristics of its campus buildings.
Metering existing buildings is expensive, costing $50,000-70,000 per building, and by itself does not indicate which aspects of the building contribute to energy usage. The project team has developed a less expensive technique of assessing building performance that will be applied to all
campus buildings over the next two years, enabling the development of precise strategies for improvement. Audit techniques cannot wholly replace the data that would be provided by metering and sub-metering, which is still the only way to actually know how much energy is consumed by an
individual building, but they can provide answers to the strategic questions that need to be answered.
The Building Performance Assessment Toolkit (BPAT) is decision making tool. It is a technique for auditing and quickly calculating normative, “as-built” energy performance, and it can also be used to identify the effect of changing or improving the building. As a normative assessment tool, it
can’t provide insight into operating or maintenance problems, but it will provide a carefully quantified performance description of every building on campus and allow the first, best
understanding of what energy is used for and how it can be used more efficiently.
Deep Audits and Simulation techniques are more expensive and time-consuming than the BPAT audit, but may be necessary in some cases to assess the effect of more complex or dynamic performance techniques, or to identify operating and maintenance problems.
BPAT also provides a more reliable method than the current cost allocation model and can be used as a replacement for the current model until metering is introduced. When metering is introduced, which we do recommend, the tool can be easily calibrated with that information and be used to investigate how the energy is consumed within each building to provide better energy planning.
This document provides a report of the second phase of the sustainability plan, specifically the development of the Penn Building Energy Database (PBED), of the BPAT+ audit tool with calibrating procedures, and an initial analysis of BPAT+ results for the buildings studied during this phase.
Team Members
University of Pennsylvania, School of Design Faculty
William Braham, PhD, FAIA, Associate Professor of Architecture
Ali Malkawi, PhD, Associate Professor of Architecture, Director, T.C. Chan Center for Building Simulation and Energy Studies
Muscoe Martin, AIA, Adjunct Professor of Architecture
Students
Ravi Srinivasan, PhD Student, Project Coordinator
Jaime Lee, MArch ’06, MS '07
John Stanislav Sadar, PhD Candidate
Loren Appin, BA ’07
Matthew Hotsko, BA ‘08
Jason Neibish, MArch ‘08
Eddy Santosa, MS ‘07
Arman Choudhary, MS ‘06
Yun Kyu Yi, PhD Candidate
Facilities and Real Estate Services Administration
Anne Pappageorge, Vice President, FRES
Tom Stump, Former Interim Vice President
Omar Blaik, Former Senior Vice President
David Hollenberg, University Architect
Charles Newman, AIA, Former University Architect
Bill Anderko, PE, Former University Engineer
Joseph Monahan, PE, Planning Engineer
Mark Kocent, AIA, Principal Planner
Dan Garofalo, Senior Facilities Planner
Tony Sorrentino, Director of External Relations