Methodologies for Improvement of Non-residential buildings Day-to-day Energy-efficiency Reliability

All buildings are designed and built to achieve a certain energy performance. Making buildings more energy efficient is one of the cheapest ways to stop or at least slow down climate change. In Norway, all the electricity that is not any longer necessary to heat or cool a house can be used for other purposes, replacing fuels that cause climate change, for example in electric cars. Saved energy means smaller energy bills, which over time will pay back the initial investment in energy efficiency. This thinking is based on one major assumption: that energy efficient buildings are actually saving as much energy (and money) as promised. But are they really delivering? The more buildings that promise high energy efficiency are built the more often measurements of actual energy use in these buildings show that there is a difference between designed and expected energy performance and energy use in reality. This has been called "energy performance gap". The MINDER research project has sought to answer two questions: Why are there sometimes gaps between expected and actual energy consumption? And what can be done to close these gaps? In three years of research done by researchers from the fields of social science, design and facilities management we have studied mainly schools and office buildings that have higher than usual energy ambitions. We found the following: 1. Are there energy performance gaps and how big are they? Talking with occupants, building managers and building owners, we were surprised how little effort was put into making sure that the buildings' ambitions are realised. When neither building mangers or occupants care for the building's original energy efficiency goals and actual energy performance, it is highly unlikely that gaps are avoided - even though we strictly speaking do not know if there are gaps because nobody keeps track of the current energy use. We also found buildings where this is very different. In these cases performance gaps existed but there was systematic work going on to reduce these gaps. 2. What causes energy performance gaps? There are many places where a building can go wrong: The energy ambitions can be unrealistic, mistakes and changes are made during construction, and buildings are often not used and operated according to expectations. In our research we focused on the latter. There we found that building occupants, managers and owners that were directly involved in the business of energy efficient buildings - for example an engineering consultancy - took much better care of the energy performance of their buildings. They measured more in detailed and had serious ambitions to reach the original goals. 3. What can be done to close performance gaps? Buildings are not just energy efficient because they are designed to be energy efficient. Particularly larger, more complex buildings like schools and office buildings depend on systematic efforts to keep energy consumption in line with expectations. These efforts have to be backed by adequate resources that are best spent on well qualified building managers that together with occupants are able to identify where their particular building does not use energy as expected.

In Norway and in other countries ambitions for energy efficient buildings are steadily increasing, and there are more and more stringent requirements of technical regulations for how energy is managed in the building. One of the critical points in this development is whether the buildings' actual energy performance can be kept close to the level of their original ambitions. This "reliability gap" between built and achieved (energy) performance of buildings has prompted the development of a broad variety of different concepts, methods and measures that are supposed to close the gap between good intentions and outcome. In this project the current state of the implementation of these concepts, methods and measures in Norwegian non-residential buildings is mapped. The results of this survey are then used to identify a limited number of cases which are studied in depth in order to deepen our understanding of critical success factors and potentials for improvement. Particular attention will be spent on the e xploration of improvements that are inspired by recent insights from the fields of product design and social science. The ultimate goal of this project is to contribute to the creation of virtuous circles between buildings and their use and operation in everyday life that are able to stabilize or even improve the buildings' energy efficiency.