Abstract
Small commercial buildings, or those comprising less than 50,000 square feet of floor area, represent 94% of U.S commercial buildings by count and consume approximately 8% of the nation’s primary energy; as such, they represent a largely unexploited opportunity for energy savings. Small commercial buildings also represent a large economic market—the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) estimated the small commercial retrofit market at USD 35.6 billion. Despite the prominence of small commercial buildings and the economic opportunity for energy retrofits, many energy efficiency programs focus on large commercial buildings, and create efficiency solutions that do not meet the needs of the small commercial market. This paper presents an analysis of 34 small commercial case study projects that implemented energy efficiency retrofits. This paper contributes to the existing building retrofit body of knowledge in the following ways: (1) it identifies the decision criteria used by small commercial building stakeholders that decided to complete an energy retrofit; (2) it identifies the most commonly implemented efficiency measures in small commercial buildings, and discusses why this is the case; and (3) it provides empirical evidence about the efficacy of installing single energy efficiency measures (EEMs) compared to packages of EEMs in small commercial buildings by reporting verified energy savings. To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to catalog decision criteria and energy savings for the existing small commercial buildings market, and this research illustrates that small commercial building decision-makers seem most motivated to retrofit their spaces by energy cost savings and operational concerns. Furthermore, small commercial building decision-makers opted to implement single-system retrofits in fifteen (15) of the thirty-four cases studied. Finally, this research documents the improved savings, in the small commercial buildings market, associated with a more integrated package of EEMs compared to a single-system approach, achieving approximately 10% energy savings for a single-system approach and more than 20% energy savings for integrated approaches. These savings translate to CO2 savings of 1,324,000 kgCO2/year to 2,647,000 kgCO2/year, respectively, assuming small commercial buildings are retrofit at a rate of 0.95% of the stock annually.
Highlights
Those that comprise less than 50,000 ft2 of usable floor space, make up approximately 94% of the US building stock and consume about 8% of the US’ primary energy [1] and as previous research has identified, profitable investments in energy conservation can generate more than USD 30 billion in annual energy cost savings, and, as such, improving the financial performance of many small businesses throughout the United States [2,3,4]
This paper presented data from 34 small commercial building energy retrofit case studies in the United States
The data illustrate that in the small commercial market, energy cost savings are the most prevalent decision criteria cited, supporting the notion that energy retrofits are easiest to sell to decision-makers when there is a compelling and reliable case to be made for reducing energy costs
Summary
Those that comprise less than 50,000 ft of usable floor space, make up approximately 94% of the US building stock and consume about 8% of the US’ primary energy [1] and as previous research has identified, profitable investments in energy conservation can generate more than USD 30 billion in annual energy cost savings, and, as such, improving the financial performance of many small businesses throughout the United States [2,3,4]. Sustainability and energy conservation are often staples in large commercial building owners’ portfolios, it has yet to be identified what drives small commercial building owners to complete energy efficiency retrofits in their buildings or portfolios. To address this deficiency, the authors present the decision criteria, retrofit measures implemented, and the energy savings results of the retrofits of 34 small commercial buildings, as reported in case studies. Prior EER research does not identify or explain what motivates decision makers to commit to EER of their buildings This paper addresses this gap by explicitly identifying the decision criteria used for each case study presented
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