Credit: Roy Googin
The U.S. Department of Energy plans to issue a solicitation during the last quarter of 2015 offering energy efficiency funding for portfolios of small and medium commercial buildings.
To be released by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the solicitation is meant to help overcome market barriers and scale up energy efficiency for commercial buildings.
The request for proposals will seek projects that have significant impact on a geographic region or market sector. Proposals must encompass at least 100 buildings or separately metered tenant spaces. The solicitation will encourage coalitions of organizations to apply jointly.
The DOE envisions giving out multiple financial awards in the form of cooperative agreements. The estimated period of performance for each award will be about three years.
Applicants should focus on delivering solutions at scale, using existing or new programs or models that increase increase energy savings.
The DOE offered the following sample models.
- Scaling up business and technical solutions for the small commercial buildings sector such as those developed through the projects funded by DOE in recent years, so that they are regularly applied across the territory of multiple program administrators.
- Solutions that allow contractors to deliver turnkey projects for energy efficiency in small buildings.
- Demonstrating at scale approaches for significantly reducing the time and resources required to initiate energy efficiency projects in small buildings, reducing transaction costs per project such as: energy audit/assessment, energy efficiency measure identification, modeling, financing, etc.
- Approaches that install replicable technical solutions across large numbers of small commercial buildings such as (but not limited to): business models delivering packages of HVAC equipment that include rooftop HVAC units and advanced controls that can apply to many types of small buildings; or business models delivering packages of technologies for a specific building type such as HVAC, refrigerated case improvements, lighting, and controls for a grocery store.
- Approaches to apply energy management and information systems (EMIS) or utility-program-compatible packaged controls across multiple systems to cost-effectively bring control to large numbers of small buildings.
- Application of highly automated approaches to measurement and verification (M&V) of energy efficiency that reduce the cost and increase the standardization of measuring energy savings from efficiency activities in small and medium buildings
- Approaches to employ the Building Energy Asset Score to standardize assessment of energy efficiency across large numbers of small and medium buildings and deliver value for building owners, occupants, and investors.
- Demonstrating at scale approaches for effective owner-tenant collaboration on energy efficiency in small and medium buildings (addressing split incentive) including resources found at the Green Lease Library
- Demonstrating at scale approaches that significantly improve the efficiency of separately-metered tenant spaces in small buildings at the time of tenant space build out.
The full Notice of Intent DE-FOA-0001389 is available here.
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