My Car Is Smarter Than Your Building: Building Controls in an Era of High-Performance Buildings

To meet the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil, high-performance (lowenergy) buildings must be the rule rather than the exception. Typical buildings today frequently do not deliver the energy performance predicted by designers or desired by the owner. One of the primary reasons for this failure to perform is that building control systems are not designed, installed and/or operated as an integrated part of the building system. High-performance buildings have additional features such as daylighting, personal lighting controls, mixed-mode or natural ventilation and demand response. To optimize performance, controls must meet further challenges to enable these new technology and design options to respond to the needs of owners and occupants while saving energy. With buildings using approximately 40% of primary energy in the U.S., improving building performance is crucial to achieving substantial energy reductions. The path to achieving zero-net energy buildings will typically require buildings to be 70% to 80% more efficient than standard practice today, with on-site renewable generating technologies providing the balance. These buildings will also need to continue to perform at these high levels of efficiency for their entire useful lives, which means that owner/operator feedback loops, benchmarking, flexible control strategies and ease of operation become critical aspects of the control systems. This paper addresses current design, technology and process barriers to achieving highperformance buildings related to the current state of building controls design/selection and implementation. It summarizes the results of prior research pinpointing areas for improvement and examines the steps necessary to restructure controls in commercial buildings to achieve potential.