ASHRAE Journal - December 2019 - 61

COLUMN EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

PHOTO 2 David Nemtzow, DOE Building Technologies Ofﬁce Director, and Ryan
Fedie, Energy Engineering Manager at Bonneville Power Administration, present
during the ASHRAE Building Our New Energy Future workshop at NREL.

* Energy Storage: The power of space, temperature,
and time.
* Integration and Interoperability: Bringing it all
together.
These discussions sparked conversation on bridging the gap between the grid industry and the building
science community. Following are key takeaways and
opportunities for research and analysis that were identiﬁed in each priority area.

Grid Services: How Can Buildings Help the Grid?
Overall, the building industry and the greater community of buildings professionals have made great
progress in integrating energy efﬁciency into building
science. The next goal is to ﬁgure out how to make buildings more ﬂexible, which means lowering energy load
peaks through energy efﬁciency and demand response.
Demand response (shifting demand to different times of
the day) can offer many advantages, including maximizing the beneﬁt of on-site renewable energy systems to
offset building loads. Renewables are expected to have
the fastest growth in the electricity sector, providing
almost 30% of power demand by 2023.3 Another integral
part of building ﬂexibility is making better predictions
about building load proﬁles by anticipating future load
curves, and then lowering and smoothing out those
curves.
Eventually, dynamic load control should be part of
the solution to combat expected growth in energy consumption. However, buildings are supposed to serve
occupants and the activities that take place within the
building, and improving grid services is ultimately

PHOTO: WERNER SLOCUM, NREL 55904

PHOTO: WERNER SLOCUM, NREL 55865

PHOTO 1 Sheila Hayter and Juan Torres address the workshop attendees, challenging them to think outside of the box.

about what the consumer needs. This means better
understanding occupancy behavior and reducing energy
consumption while maintaining comfortable, safe, productive, and healthy indoor environments.
The next step is ﬁguring out how to ensure the conversation about how buildings can support the grid
gains momentum-we may not know exactly where the
future of buildings is headed, but the value of ﬂexibility
is something deﬁnitive that we can point to for critical
future success in grid service needs.

Buildings On the Grid: The Questions We Should Be Asking
What Are the Right Performance Metrics for a Grid-Integrated Building?

For compliance with ANSI/ASHRAE/IES Standard
90.1-2019, a baseline energy cost budget is established
speciﬁc to the size and program of the building and
prescriptive requirements of Standard 90.1. The design
efﬁciency is expressed as percent better than 90.1, such
as "30% better than Standard 90.1-2019." Metrics are
also set on percent annual energy from on-site renewable energy or percent annual carbon reduction, but
almost always on an annual-average basis with cost
savings estimated according to the rate schedule and
with carbon and other emissions savings based on
annual-average multipliers. Grid integration of buildings demands a more exacting approach to calculating
utility cost savings and emissions, based on exactly when
and where power is consumed, rather than total annual
energy consumption. Cost savings should be based on
D E C E M B E R 2 0 19

ashrae.org

ASHRAE JOURNAL

61
http://www.ashrae.org
ASHRAE Journal - December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ASHRAE Journal - December 2019
