Small and medium-sized commercial buildings can be retrofitted to significantly reduce their energy use, however it is a huge challenge as owners usually lack of the expertise and resources to conduct detailed on-site energy audit to identify and evaluate cost-effective energy technologies. This study presents a DEEP (database of energy efficiency performance) that provides a direct resource for quick retrofit analysis of commercial buildings. DEEP, compiled from the results of about ten million EnergyPlus simulations, enables an easy screening of ECMs (energy conservation measures) and retrofit analysis. The simulations utilize prototype models representative of small and mid-size offices and retails in California climates. In the formulation of DEEP, large scale EnergyPlus simulations were conducted on high performance computing clusters to evaluate hundreds of individual and packaged ECMs covering envelope, lighting, heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, plug-loads, and service hot water. The architecture and simulation environment to create DEEP is flexible and can expand to cover additional building types, additional climates, and new ECMs. In this study DEEP is integrated into a web-based retrofit toolkit, the Commercial Building Energy Saver, which provides a platform for energy retrofit decision making by querying DEEP and unearthing recommended ECMs, their estimated energy savings and financial payback.

The paper presents a method and process to establish a database of energy efficiency performance (DEEP) to enable quick and accurate assessment of energy retrofit of commercial buildings. DEEP was compiled from results of about 35 million EnergyPlus simulations. DEEP provides energy savings for screening and evaluation of retrofit measures targeting the small and medium-sized office and retail buildings in California. The prototype building models are developed for a comprehensive assessment of building energy performance based on DOE commercial reference buildings and the California DEER prototype buildings. The prototype buildings represent seven building types across six vintages of constructions and 16 California climate zones. DEEP uses these prototypes to evaluate energy performance of about 100 energy conservation measures covering envelope, lighting, heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, plug-loads, and domestic hot water. DEEP consists the energy simulation results for individual retrofit measures as well as packages of measures to consider interactive effects between multiple measures. The large scale EnergyPlus simulations are being conducted on the super computers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The pre-simulation database is a part of an on-going project to develop a web-based retrofit toolkit for small and medium-sized commercial buildings in California, which provides real-time energy retrofit feedback by querying DEEP with recommended measures, estimated energy savings and financial payback period based on users’ decision criteria of maximizing energy savings, energy cost savings, carbon reduction, or payback of investment. The pre-simulated database and associated comprehensive measure analysis enhances the ability to performance assessments of retrofits to reduce energy use for small and medium buildings and business owners who typically do not have resources to conduct costly building energy audit. DEEP will be migrated into the DEnCity - DOE’s Energy City, which integrates large-scale energy data for multi-purpose, open, and dynamic database leveraging diverse source of existing simulation data.