Calculating Energy Efficiency Potential – An Easy Approach

Improving energy efficiency in our homes, businesses, schools, or any industries are some of the most constructive, cost-effective ways to address the challenges of high energy prices, energy security, and global climate change. Despite these benefits, energy efficiency measures remain critically underutilised. This blog post explains an easy approach to calculating energy efficiency potential.

It is time to take advantage of improvements with energy analysis software, energy efficiency and successful work with the analysis and design of buildings. You can broaden and expand these efforts and capture the energy savings that all these essential tools for the entire building industry now offer.

Conducting an analysis provides key information to advance energy efficiency in your building.

The correct evaluation of the available potential to reduce energy consumption and the related costs are relatively inexpensive. According to several studies they might even come with decreasing costs.

The question to raise is why these measures are not implemented spontaneously, if so many exist, along with the economic benefits?

Calculating energy efficiency potential to improve buildings is typically assessed in terms of three categories:

1. Technical Potential, 2. Economic Potential and 3. Achievable Potential.

Based on these you can decide on options and create an action plan: –

1. First acknowledge, quantify and establish the value of energy efficiency by considering energy savings, capacity savings and environmental benefits.
2. Develop long-term energy-saving goals.
3. Establish funding requirements to deliver cost-effective solutions.
4. Designate responsible Users for administering the energy efficiency software.
5. Commit to consistent software for Administrators to recover energy efficiency costs and in a timely manner.
6. Align utility incentives with the delivery of cost-effective energy efficiency measures.

In order to take advantage of any energy software for calculating energy efficiency potential you need to take into consideration the following:

1. The energy forecast.
2. Automated calculation of the energy balance of emitted and supplied energy.
3. Modelling of the climate shell and the constructions.
4. Calculation of the total savings for all efficiency measures.
5. Reports and how to analyse the results using comparison data.

If you’re wondering what to look for in an energy calculation software, you must take into consideration the data inputs and if the final deliverables meet the Project Manager’s requirements.

You should have the following type of questions:

1. What is the current reliability? What does the load forecast include?
2. What demand-side resources should we include?
3. What specific results do we need to see?
4. Do we have available data in order to start modelling?
5. Should any risk analysis be involved?
6. Are any cost-effectiveness tests available together with other assumptions?
7. Is there enough time available for the calculations?

Using less energy to provide the same or an improved level of service to any building, helped by a wide range of approaches and automated tools, you can regardless of the building type, reduce energy consumption with suitable efficiency actions.

Why not take advantage of a free trial of our BIM Energy software, which combines state-of-the-art calculation algorithms with a user-friendly interface, to answer complex questions about energy usage and to quickly evaluate potential for energy savings.