Steve Heinz of EnergyCap puts forward the following ideas for a possible new option in IPMVP. What are your thoughts? Would you use this type of a protocol in your business? We''ll look forward to your input online and off.
We find a huge number of building owners/operators who are interested in assessing the results of energy initiatives (most frequently mechanical upgrades) but wouldn’t get past the table of contents in IPMVP. Neither would their local HVAC contractor. These are not performance contracts per se and no third party financing is involved.
The idea is an IPMVP “Option E – ENERGY STAR Rating.” (I realize that currently that is not applicable to international markets.)
In this M&V option, the building would be submitted to ENERGY STAR pre-retrofit and again one year (or more) post-retrofit. The increase in ENERGY STAR rating (say from 60 to 85) would be used as the M&V of the project. Assuming that an ENERGY STAR rating is a fair approximation of building performance, this approach provides an extremely simple and virtually no-cost way to obtain a sense of energy initiative impact.
Obviously we’d have to address some details, such as provision for other variables, valuation of the savings, and how to determine what an ENERGY STAR ‘delta’ in before/after ratings means quantitatively. I think it would be interesting to run some cases studies of this approach vs. other IPMVP options, particularly Whole Facility, to see how they compare for simple test cases.
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Nathan Shetterley (nathan.shetterley@gmail.com)
EVO New Media Director
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