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Energy Use Baseline for Advanced Manufacturing

Hey Gurus. Might anyone have experience, or thoughts, with regard to establishing an energy use baseline for a new advanced manufacturing facility we are working on for a regional technical community college? This type of academic facility is so relatively new, the program doesn't fall into the typical "College/University" building type from CBECS, and while that is what we've used thus far, we are looking to dial in a bit more accurately. Two-thirds of the floor area consists of high-bay and low-bay labs that include precision machining, fabrication, robotics, and computer technology and the other one-third consists of traditional classrooms, administrative offices, and student study/collaboration space. Appreciate your thoughts. 

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Sat, 04/04/2020 - 10:39

Your best bet is the I2SL / LBNL Laboratory Benchmarking Tool (LBT), formerly the "Labs21 Benchmarking Tool". https://lbt.i2sl.org/ Click "View data as Guest", and be sure to filter for "measured" only, to exclude energy model data. After a concerted push over the last 2 years, there are now 631 real, measured datapoints (laboratory buildings) in the set. Jacob jacob.werner@perkinswill.com

Sun, 04/05/2020 - 13:49

Jason - Jacob's suggestion is a good one. The benchmarking tool allows you to filter labs that are maker spaces.  Does the program you're designing for already exists somewhere within the college as a potential source for some benchmarking? We worked on a couple projects that have advanced manufacturing recently, so we spent time looking at the institution's existing facilities and pulled energy data from them. One was a community college project, and we saw that where they have the program now was actually one of their lower EUI buildings.  What became apparent to us (and might apply to your project) is that they didn't actually run the equipment a lot, especially compared to what we are accustomed to seeing in university lab/research building that set equipment up and run it for weeks/months at a time. It makes sense in the context of a community college, because much of the coursework is about learning *how* to use the equipment before actually operating it. That meant we would see a whole class of students learning how to use a single machine in a room full of them. And then once the students could run it, the operation of the equipment was mostly limited to the class duration. The result was that while the connected loads were large, the actual consumption was relatively low.  

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