Using the project’s estimated budget early on to integrate materials with recycled content in the design and specs can help prevent costly change orders during construction.
Recalibrating the energy model to match the actual energy use of tenant spaces will add some cost to your project. Recalibration should be done 10 to 12 months after occupancy, and the added cost should be minor if it only involves something like adjusting occupancy hours. However, note that unforeseen complexities can drive up these costs.
Because your M&V program monitors actual building operations over time, M&V procedures can lead to valuable operational savings by uncovering building system design, installation, and control issues not caught by fundamental, or even additional, commissioning.
The payback period for an M&V program depends on the initial cost of additional meters and whether the system identifies inefficiencies that wouldn’t have been found otherwise. Some fixes may be substantial enough to pay for the metering system. After your BMS or submetering system has been installed, true return depends on the commitment of the owner and operations staff to making the best use of the system.
If you are attempting this credit through Option D, energy modeling and recalibration of the energy model will incur additional fees for your project—more if your design team did not use an energy model to do the actual design work for the energy optimization of lighting and HVAC.
Implementing M&V into your project after mechanical and electrical systems have been designed can cause this credit to become cost-prohibitive due to redesign costs.
A BMS typically includes some M&V capabilities. In buildings with these systems planned or already installed, the cost premium for M&V should be smaller than the percentages given above.
Studies find that, for new construction the combined cost of the installed equipment and the first year of monitoring is less than 1% of the total project cost for buildings larger than 150,000 ft2, and less than 1.5% for smaller buildings.
Studies find that, for retrofits, M&V costs average no more than 5% of the total project cost. Operational costs appear to be, on average, less than 10% of the savings associated with a retrofit.
