Solution Overview
Over the last 40 years, our industry has tried nobly to improve the performance of buildings, from energy conservation to occupant benefits relating to improved indoor environmental quality. The next generation of building owners are demanding innovative, cost-effective, high performance buildings. We have many well-established sustainability programs to guide decision makers on how to build higher performing buildings. Yet, decades later and billions of dollars spent on sustainability, we still do not “know if we got what we paid for”?
Despite the large numbers of LEED-certified buildings, we have little data upon which to judge actual energy performance in operations. AUROS360™ was founded on the idea of Evidence-based Performance. By connecting planning to operations in the construction cycle, we provide the digital infrastructure to dynamically track performance against owner’s sustainability goals post occupancy. Only with an integrated dashboard, showing how a building is performing against key metrics, will an owner know if a building met the sustainability expectations.
Evidence-based Performance, defined through a single set of metrics that gauges performance against a standard, is particularly important when assessing whole-building energy and water consumption. This context is necessary to compare and contrast normalized groups of similar buildings across climate zones. Benchmarking with Energy Star Portfolio Manager (ESPM) metrics is the industry standard with 500,000 properties and over 50% of commercial buildings square footage reporting energy use. The ESPM’s common building metrics are used in the nationally representative survey (CBECS) for determining the building’s performance rank relative to its peers. The property types in the CBECS database represents over 20 difference building types. Further, most sustainability programs are now using the ESPM metrics in their certification management programs.
It is now evident that policies, like mandatory public disclosure ordinances and building stretch codes, require we look at whole-building metrics to measure building performance. These trends necessitate real-time automation in the calculation of building performance. AUROS360 fills the need for a computational modeling system that will normalize and organize building’s performance automatically and in real-time.
Solution Approach
High Performance Building projects often reference zero-energy building aspirations. Critically, the question becomes “How do you define zero energy buildings”?
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) defines a zero-energy building as a residential or commercial building with greatly reduced energy needs through efficiency gains such that the balance of energy needs can be supplied with renewable technologies. NREL documents four definitions, as follows; Net Zero Site Energy Use Intensity (Site EUI), Net Zero Source Use Intensity (Source EUI), Net Zero Energy Costs (Cost), and Net Zero Energy Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG Emissions).
AUROS360™ incorporates integrated custom real-time analytics for all four approaches to zero-energy as defined by NREL and ESPM. AUROS360 automatically and transparently displays Site EUI, Source EUI, Energy Costs and GHG Emissions for building(s) for energy source data from primary source utility meters, utility invoices and whole-building simulation.