Multi-technology building system retrofits for utility incentive programs: Savings, costs and baseline considerations

Utility incentive programs are an important channel to support the deployment of energy efficiency in buildings. To date, these programs have largely been limited to single-component strategies. However, many utilities are now motivated to identify and develop multi-component system retrofits to achieve deeper energy savings, which are essential to achieving broader energy and greenhouse gas reduction goals in the buildings sector. In this paper we present the energy savings, demand reductions, and cost-effectiveness of 16 systems retrofit packages in six utility regions in the United States. These results are being used by these utilities to inform and develop incentive programs for systems retrofits. Our anal-ysis shows that packages with proven lighting and HVAC measures can provide 5-22% whole building annual energy savings, and 13-22% annual energy costs savings, using utility incentive program baselines (code and existing building). The packages are reasonably cost effective for replace-on-burnout but gen-erally not for a retrofit scenario prior to end of equipment life. Demand response can increase both the energy savings and energy cost savings, further improving the cost effectiveness of these packages. We analyzed the impact of using existing building vs. code baselines for calculating savings, showing that the choice of baseline in developing utility incentive programs has a substantial impact on the attributa-ble energy savings to a program, with significant implications for the overall viability of a program (gen-erally savings against existing building condition are higher and improve project and program cost-effectiveness). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

Utility incentive programs are crucial for promoting energy efficiency in buildings, but they have been limited to single-component strategies. However, there is now a growing interest in developing multi-component system retrofits to achieve deeper energy savings. This paper presents the energy savings, demand reductions, and cost-effectiveness of 16 systems retrofit packages in the US, which are being used by utilities to inform incentive programs. The results show that packages with proven lighting and HVAC measures can provide significant energy and cost savings, and the choice of baseline for calculating savings has a substantial impact on program viability.