Gold Mining in Your Back Yard: Discovering, Exploiting and Measuring Unsuspected O&M Savings Opportunities with Diagnostic Benchmarking: Field Trial Results

$150 billion/yr. in potential US energy savings, enhanced competitiveness, and reduced CO2 emissions depend on swiftly adopting Diagnostic Benchmarking. Expected savings consist mostly of no-cost Operating and Maintenance (“O&M”) improvements in existing buildings. Early energy audits required that O&M be improved before considering retrofits. But audits didn’t effectively identify O&M opportunities. Appropriate measurement and verification, to ensure O&M problems got fixed, and stayed fixed, wasn’t available yet. Auditors and contractors, perceiving O&M problems as difficult and unprofitable, relative to retrofits, gave O&M little attention. Management saw O&M as overhead to be minimized. “Universal Benchmarking” recently showed early O&M problems haven’t disappeared. Apparently similar buildings differ greatly in annual energy use intensity (EUI). Newer or larger buildings sometimes show relatively high EUIs. Universal benchmarking implies large O&M differences between buildings, but doesn’t explicitly reveal O&M problems. Concurrently, Diagnostic Benchmarking in 31 buildings achieved substantial savings. Despite uncompleted O&M and retrofits, no-cost O&M savings equaled 18.7% of initial energy use. Diagnostic Benchmarking of individual buildings proved essential to quickly find, capture, measure and retain O&M savings, and enabled important findings:  For triage, higher fuel-specific seasonal EUI predicted greater savings; 100% of measured savings came from 60% of benchmarked buildings.  Higher seasonal EUI or gas use, especially in newer buildings, and smaller size, indicated probable higher O&M savings percentages.  Continuous benchmarking quickly detected non-obvious failures; correcting such failures generated significant savings.  Benchmarking enabled right-sizing of replacement equipment. Measured savings trends suggest new strategies and infrastructure for building efficiency.