Useful Links & Information:

Department of Energy – Building Technologies Program
This site is a great recourse to building energy efficiency, including Commissioning & Retrocommissioning.

Pacific Gas & Electric Education & Training
PG&E offers great classes for building owners, engineers & architects; most classes are free.

California Commissioning Collaborative
The CCC is a California nonprofit public benefit corporation aimed to educate and establishing standards for a building commissioning process. They offer many training workshops including one on Commissioning.

NCBC 2005 Proceedings Now Available Online - June 6, 2005

New Construction Commission Cost, by PECI (PDF)
New Study Measures Cost-Effectiveness of Commissioning in 224 Commercial Buildings (Published by Lawrence Livermore Labs).

Main Report (Cx-Costs-Benefits.pdf)

In Summary:
Study finds median payback of 0.7 years in existing buildings, 4.8 years in new construction.
Energy-management professionals have long believed commissioning to be a highly cost-effective way to detect and correct building deficiencies. But a lack of standardized information on its costs and benefits has been a barrier to widespread acceptance. A new study headed by Evan Mills at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory bridges this gap by establishing the largest available collection of standardized information on commissioning’s cost effectiveness.

The new study is designed as a “meta-analysis.” It compiles and synthesizes extensive published and unpublished data from building commissioning projects in 21 states over the last 20 years. The study’s total numbers are impressive. Data comes from 224 buildings representing 30.4 million sqft of commissioned floor area (73% in existing buildings and 27% in new construction).

In order to attain median cost and benefit data, the researchers developed a detailed and uniform methodology for characterizing, analyzing and synthesizing the results. For existing buildings, they found median commissioning costs of $0.27/sqft, whole-building energy savings of 15% and payback times of 0.7 years. For new construction, median commissioning costs were $1.00/sqft (0.6% of total construction costs), yielding a median payback time of 4.8 years (excluding quantified non-energy impacts.) Non-energy benefits were quantified in a number of cases and in many instances exceeded the value of the energy savings and the cost of commissioning itself.

The study reports that commissioning is one of the most cost-effective means of improving energy efficiency in existing and new buildings alike. The most cost-effective results occur among energy-intensive facilities like hospitals and laboratories. HVAC systems presented the most problems, particularly within air-distribution systems. The most common correctional measures focus on operations and control.