Demand response (DR) is an energy management strategy that allows electricity consumers to receive financial compensation for temporarily reducing or rescheduling power use upon request. DR creates opportunities for building owners and managers to realize financial, operational, and environmental benefits by changing energy use patterns in response to market signals.

Economizers rarely save as much as they should and some waste a lot of energy. Better design, controls, installation, monitoring, and maintenance can help economizers meet their potential.

Though more costly to install and more complicated to operate, a chiller plant offers a number of benefits over simple packaged cooling units, including greater energy efficiency, better controllability, and longer life.

Designing buildings for both high indoor air quality and energy efficiency requires an integrated design approach. There is a movement in the commercial real estate industry to pay more attention to the issue of indoor air quality (IAQ) throughout the design and construction stages of a building's life.

Centrifugal pumps perform many important functions to control the built environment. The physics and basic mechanics of pumps have not changed substantially in the last century.

Using the whole-systems approach to building design, designers around the world have succeeded at creating highly efficient air-conditioning systems that provide excellent workspace comfort.

This Advanced VAV System Design Brief provides recommendations to help engineers improve the efficiency of large HVAC systems. It focuses on built-up variable-air-volume (VAV) systems in multistory office buildings.

To truly minimize the energy use of a drivepower system-which includes the motor, its controls, and the connection between the motor and the equipment it drives-designers need to consider how these components operate as a system rather than looking at them on an individual basis.

Energy costs are a significant expense for facilities that operate industrial refrigeration systems. In new construction projects, significant energy savings can be achieved by incorporating energy efficiency technologies in the project design. For facilities being expanded or upgraded, ensuring the efficiency of the refrigeration systems can lead to significant energy savings without compromising productivity.

Domestic water heating (DHW) accounts for a significant share of multifamily building energy use, especially in California's coastal towns. While each new construction project will have a different ratio of energy end uses, one can look at the existing building stock to get an idea of how much is attributable to DHW systems. According to the Department of Energy's Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), DHW accounted for around 32% of overall energy use for existing multifamily units in the late 1990's.

Acceptance Testing is one of the core components of the Standards' ongoing effort to optimize energy use in modern construction. It's intent is to address the importance of proper system installation, as realized energy savings from advanced systems depend on them being installed and operating properly.

Process heating is a significant source of energy consumption in the industrial and manufacturing sectors, and it often results in a large amount of waste heat that is discharged into the atmosphere.

Compressed air - commonly called the fourth utility - is in high demand in most industrial facilities. Despite its widespread application, however, up to two-thirds of the compressed air systems in operation have either an obvious problem that affects production or a hidden problem that drives compressed air production costs higher.

Commissioning, retro-commissioning, re-commissioning, and automated monitoring and fault detection are all systematic methods of ensuring that a building and its hardware perform to the level intended by the owner and design team.

Demand-controlled ventilation (DCV) is a control strategy that varies the amount of ventilation outside air delivered to a space based on input from a single carbon dioxide (CO2) sensor or group of sensors.