Hello and Welcome, my name is Colin Evans. This course is titled Energy Audit Modeling, which will provide and introduction to energy auditing and how energy modeling is applied to energy audit projects

In this application Energy Auditing is defined as the analysis of a buildings energy consumption and the process of recommending changes that can reduce this energy consumption.

As an energy auditor, whether an engineer, architect, or contractor, we provide recommendations and information to the building owner or manager to help them make important decisions about energy efficiency options.

The American Society for Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers has published a guide to energy auditing. This is not the only publication on the subject, and it is not very technically in depth. It’s strength is that it gives a great framework for conducting energy audits by clearly defining 3 levels of effort and detail of the analysis.

These 3 levels build upon each other so that level 2 includes all of the steps in level 1, and a level 3 audit includes both the walk through and the energy survey and engineering analysis.

All energy audits will include a physical walk through of the building to document current conditions, but this isn’t all that needs to be done in this first level of auditing. Calculating the energy use of the building and comparing to similar buildings is a very important first step of the energy audit process because it gives everyone involved a rough idea of how much room for improvement there really is. This step can even be completed before the actual building walkthrough is done.

Next, we need to estimate costs and savings for energy efficiency measures. Energy Efficiency Measures are the specific recommendations or modifications that we identify as ways to reduce energy consumption. Some people call these Energy Conservation Measures which means the same thing. In this presentation I will often refer to these as EEMs. For this basic level of energy auditing, these EEMs will focus on no-cost and low-cost improvements that can be made immediately.

The last step in this first level of analysis is to simply identify and explain possible higher cost projects that will save energy. These projects will require capital investment that is relatively high for the type of building being audited. All three of these major steps listed here will be discussed further in the following slides.