Office of the Future - Phase 2
Project Number ET 08.01 Organization SCE End-use Other Sector Commercial Project Year(s) 2008 - 2008Project Summary
Office of the Future looks across a spectrum of technologies and energy factors including thermal comfort, lighting systems, building envelope, plug loads and overlays economic and human factors analysis on traditional engineering and product improvement efforts. The resulting models will not only describe more efficient, demand-responsive technologies and their effects on human performance, but the drivers and barriers to their adoption in the marketplace and the real world. The objective of the Office of the Future - Phase 2 project is to improve the energy efficiency and demand response capability of several different office space types. This project is a scoping study and has two key areas of focus: 1) Develop performance metrics to enable development of codes and standards which target energy use for a defined office area. 2) Develop 2-way communication capability for all energy-using components of an office. An important underlying assumption of the Office of the Future - Phase 2 project is that 2-way communication will enable higher levels of energy savings than stand-alone control devices, such as dedicated occupancy sensors.
Project Deliverables include:
~ Categorize and define office space types (cube farm, administrative offices, etc).
~ Consider the office space only, not the total building.
~ Study and identify all connected load in the defined office spaces.
~ Identify each specific technology.
~ Determine how and when each individual component is used.
~ Investigate potential for two-way communication with all connected load.
~ Establish a performance based criteria for total connected electrical load for each identified office type.
~ Explore possibility of a kilowatts/sqft metric rather than the traditional watts/sqft.
~ Determine a performance criteria based on current code minimums.
~ Create a menu of measures that when installed as a system will provide the stated improvement over the determined performance criteria:
* 25% solution: Technologies which produce savings that exceed the baseline, current Title 24 code requirements, by 25%
* 50% solution: Technologies which produce savings that exceed the baseline, current Title 24 code requirements, by 50%
* 75% and Zero Energy solutions: Research and develop advanced systems to achieve savings exceeding the baseline, current Title 24 code requirements, by 75% and 100%.