What is Constant Commissioning anyway?

Spending more time in the Energy space has emphasized how much opportunity that there is in the world to use data to improve outcomes. I have found almost identical concepts to adaptive learning in the education space, so I wanted to take a minute and introduce constant commissioning to my LinkedIn friends! (and for those in the Energy space that want to learn more about Adaptive Learning – see here).

According to the World Resources Institute, 40% of the world’s energy is consumed by buildings, and on average a commercial building wastes about 30% of the overall energy it consumes. One of the top ways to combat this matter is through constant commissioning buildings in order to reduce overall energy waste, which also has the benefit of improving building owners bottom-line and increasing asset value in the process, I think of this as a win-win-win. So, what is constant commissioning?

Taking a Step Back

Before we dive into the specifics of constant commissioning, let’s take a step back and consider what it means to commission a building and the factors that make commissioning necessary to begin with.

First, there’s the reality that most buildings start behind the efficiency curve due to Low-bid contracting and not being set up properly in the first place often leads to validate that they are performing to their design. The result is often buildings operating off how they should be from day one.

Simply put, to commission a building (for this piece we are focusing on just the buildings HVAC systems) means examining its performance and energy-consuming systems to ensure that they are operating as intended. And why wouldn’t they? Because, as it turns out, most systems lose their energy efficiency by 20% every one to two years. If left unchecked this drift can translate into some serious consequences with regards to safety, comfort and energy waste (which leads to excess spend).

What Causes Drift?

While there are many overall reasons for why any given energy system or facility may be operating below peak performance, some examples include:

• Equipment not being installed properly
• Faulty sensors
• Software programming errors
• Scheduling errors
• Malfunctioning systems

When a building is commissioned, these system faults and maintenance issues are detected and remedied to achieve sustainable energy savings and improved building efficiency. Hence, commissioning is an important process used by building owners and operators on their quest for efficiency. There are a few different approaches to commissioning a property.

The Quest for Efficiency

For simplicity, let’s focus on commissioning the HVAC or central plant -- by far the largest consumer of energy, thereby, providing the largest opportunity for savings and waste reduction. If we look at this graph, you’ll see that the natural progression of a building’s energy usage, travels up, and to the right deviating and consuming more energy.

Unfortunately, this is not a revenue graph, it’s an energy usage graph, so this upward trend is the opposite of what we want to see.

Often, we incorrectly come to believe that this upward trend is unavoidable. That energy-consuming systems need to be regularly replaced as they age, and that utility bills are fixed, immovable expenses. But, this is actually only the case when commercial building operators do not more closely and holistically scrutinize and examine performance and utility usage. Enter the concept of commissioning.

Let’s review the different approaches.

Different Commissioning Approaches

A building that is Retro-Commissioned, is one that already has an existing BMS system in place, and is commissioned after the building is live, to examine performance. This building is commissioned once, and then enters the natural trajectory caused by system drift.

A system that is Re-Commissioned is “reset” every two years, generally as they begin to encounter issues that require restoring energy systems to their peak performance standards. Re-commissioning a building is an intensive process that often requires consultants manually pulling reports and assessing the factors that contribute to the system’s drift.

Constant Commissioning involves establishing an uninterrupted feed and analysis of data from the relevant systems in order to routinely monitor the central energy plant and ensure it is performing as intended. Today, this approach is made possible through new technologies like Entic (shameless plug#1) that allow granular monitoring and analysis of an HVAC system.

The Evolution of Analytics

Overtime, many approaches have been relied upon to utilize data to improve building performance utilizing data, and each new solution offers greater effectiveness with less cost. In a common practice that continues today, BMS Administrators are delegated to property-level responsibility and tasked with troubleshooting issues as they arise. But, due to the nature of their roles and armed with limited technology, these professionals are often left to address issues after they begin to impact comfort, safety and the bottom-line. Building Engineers are forced have to sort through thousands of alerts, which become so noisy that they are ignored until the situation has gone too far.

Consultants are also called upon to address building energy consumption issues, providing additional expertise to resolve the matters at hand. However, they often lack intimate familiarity with the properties. Generally speaking, their goal is to resolve the problem they were brought in to address within the established budget, which often leads them to remedy the symptoms and not the root of the problem. Lastly, because of the time-consuming nature of manually sifting through reports to make recommendations and often lack familiarity with properties, there are limitations to their effectiveness. 

So to date, best practices involve and an extraordinary amount of people, cost and time. Additionally, the building will just move back to a place where it drifts back to its natural state, leading to energy and utility waste.

Constant Commissioning Today

Fortunately, new technologies can help and are providing building owners and operators the ability to pull and analyze data in a smart and automated fashion at extremely granular levels, making constantly commissioning more practical to operationalize and better able to deliver a sustained impact. This technology eliminates the manual pulling of reports locally on site and provides new levels of operational intelligence into how a building’s – or entire portfolio’s -- key systems are performing on an ongoing basis, making it possible to identify specific root causes and their estimated financial impact. This evolution in analytics produces better results with a high ROI, all the while supporting the health and longevity of your central energy plant. Shameless plug #2 – go check out Entic to learn more!