Energy Savings Results from Small Commercial Building Retrofits in the US

Rachael Sherman, Hariharan Naganathan and Kristen Parrish
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Rachael Sherman: Engineering Technology and Construction Management, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Hariharan Naganathan: Construction Management, School of Management, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, MA 02115, USA
Kristen Parrish: School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 19, 1-16

Abstract: Small commercial buildings, or those comprising less than 50,000 square feet of floor area, represent 94% of U.S commercial buildings by count and consume approximately 8% of the nation’s primary energy; as such, they represent a largely unexploited opportunity for energy savings. Small commercial buildings also represent a large economic market—the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) estimated the small commercial retrofit market at USD 35.6 billion. Despite the prominence of small commercial buildings and the economic opportunity for energy retrofits, many energy efficiency programs focus on large commercial buildings, and create efficiency solutions that do not meet the needs of the small commercial market. This paper presents an analysis of 34 small commercial case study projects that implemented energy efficiency retrofits. This paper contributes to the existing building retrofit body of knowledge in the following ways: (1) it identifies the decision criteria used by small commercial building stakeholders that decided to complete an energy retrofit; (2) it identifies the most commonly implemented efficiency measures in small commercial buildings, and discusses why this is the case; and (3) it provides empirical evidence about the efficacy of installing single energy efficiency measures (EEMs) compared to packages of EEMs in small commercial buildings by reporting verified energy savings. To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to catalog decision criteria and energy savings for the existing small commercial buildings market, and this research illustrates that small commercial building decision-makers seem most motivated to retrofit their spaces by energy cost savings and operational concerns. Furthermore, small commercial building decision-makers opted to implement single-system retrofits in fifteen (15) of the thirty-four cases studied. Finally, this research documents the improved savings, in the small commercial buildings market, associated with a more integrated package of EEMs compared to a single-system approach, achieving approximately 10% energy savings for a single-system approach and more than 20% energy savings for integrated approaches. These savings translate to CO 2 savings of 1,324,000 kgCO 2 /year to 2,647,000 kgCO 2 /year, respectively, assuming small commercial buildings are retrofit at a rate of 0.95% of the stock annually.

Keywords: small commercial; retrofit; energy efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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