Instrumentation systems for commercial building energy efficiency

America's 4.7 million commercial buildings account for nearly one-fifth of the U.S. energy consumption. Studies estimate that commercial building instrumentation and control systems that can provide energy management and control, HVAC commissioning, HVAC fault detection, and lighting management have the potential to reduce up to 30% energy consumption. The most significant key enabler for this progress is future instrumentation systems that can be deployed in commercial buildings with the proper balance of life cycle cost and performance. A synopsis of an ongoing ORNL R&D activity involving advanced instrumentation designed for deploying in single-story and two-story flexible research platforms at ORNL is presented. This includes low cost wireless sensor networks (WSN), energy management and control, intelligent building fault detection and diagnosis (FDD), and advanced control methodologies and how they can be applied to existing buildings as a retrofit strategy.