Federal Building Performance Standards (BPS) are being finalized to help increase operational efficiency of buildings by setting performance thresholds and holding building managers accountable for adhering to these requirements. This project aims to significantly reduce the burden of compliance tracking and reporting. More importantly, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) plans to use this new accountability to offer an innovative technology transfer approach for technologies that have been successfully demonstrated under ESTCP. Both the Navy and Army have already launched enterprise level energy management control systems with ESTCP partnership. This project will streamline compliance tracking and reporting by integrating compliance and reporting tracking directly into the existing energy management control systems resources.

NREL will help establish a new Federal Building Compliance Management Program (FBCMP) that will combine DoD agencies’ siloed data sources (demonstrated through the Army’s data platforms) and link them with a BPS tracking system and the Federal Energy Management Program’s Compliance Tracking System to create a single, unified workflow. The FBCMP will significantly reduce the administrative burden for federal facility managers. Once BPS tracking systems identify buildings that are failing to progress toward improving their operational efficiency, federal facility managers (and individual building energy managers) will need to identify solutions to remedy their poor performance. NREL will enable the enhanced FBCMP to recommend proven ESTCP technologies that are appropriate to address newly encountered energy performance issues through the development of an ESTCP Technologies Knowledge Base Library (TKBL). With convenient access to relevant ESTCP technology data and information, facility managers will be able to use ESTCP technologies to meet required performance thresholds.

The FBCMP and ESTCP TKBL will assist the Army in working towards (1) improving reliance and resilience of operational buildings; (2) improving energy and water efficiency; and (3) monitoring and verifying energy and water savings. Additional DoD agencies will have the opportunity to build on the success of the Army’s adoption of this platform in future years. Already, the Navy is involved in this technology transfer approach to obtain a roadmap for their agency to adopt the platform. Eventually, the success of the technology transfer approach can be realized through a DoD agency-wide adoption of the FBCMP with ESTCP TKBL interface, streamlining compliance requirements for all DoD agencies. (Anticipated Project Completion - 2025)