Page 591 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

558 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

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UCI’s Smart Labs Initiative, a proven program of safely reducing energy use
in research laboratories by as much as 60%. The US Department of Energy
3
(DOE) modeled its Smart Labs Accelerator after UCI’s comprehensive
program, which is the basis of the campus’ partnership in the DOE’s Better
Buildings Challenge. 4
So, what defines a “smart lab”? Essentially, there are seven components,
each of which needs to be addressed to attain the level of energy savings
realized by UCI:
1. Fundamental platform of dynamic, digital control systems
2. Demand-based ventilation
3. Low power density, demand-based lighting
4. Exhaust fan discharge velocity optimization
5. Pressure drop optimization
6. Fume hood flow optimization
7. Commissioning with automated cross-platform fault detection
UCI began to seriously focus on energy savings in the early 1990s when it
adopted a policy to outperform California’s already stringent Title 24 Energy
Code by 30% in new construction. By 2008, UCI’s energy management team
began to suspect that building energy systems had waste designed in, and by
more than a few percent! The entrenched professional culture of overdesigning
“margins of safety” and over-relying on what were then considered best
practices appeared to be the cause of significant energy waste. Estimates of the
potential for energy savings in this environment were understandably low and
suppressed even further by the fact that early rollouts of “smart” buildings had
been underdeveloped and oversold.
With a belief that energy savings of as much as 50% might be possible,
UCI embarked on an overall program of redesigning laboratory building en-
ergy systems. A number of factors contributed to this pursuit, including the
realization that buildings’ energy systems had been, to that point, designed to
waste more energy than realized for a variety of reasons: older, nondynamic
systems operated at fixed volumes/levels/speeds and “worst case” parameters.
Before digital controls and sensors, a margin of safety was needed. The energy
needed to pump water and air is nonlinear, and reheating is excessive when air
changes are high.
By focusing holistically on building energy system design (in retrofits and
new construction), UCI concluded that the key to a “smart” building is to
provide (1) just the right amount of energy, (2) at just the right place, (3) at just
the right time. By challenging all accepted design practices and using a

2. https://www.ehs.uci.edu/programs/energy/UCISmartLabsInitiative_Feb222016.pdf.
3. https://energy.gov/eere/femp/smart-labs-accelerator.
4. https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/showcase-projects/smart-labs-initiativenatural-
sciences-ii.