Applied Research

QuEST staff continues to lead successful research and development projects for both public and private organizations that further the industry's progress toward more sustainable use of energy resources. Research projects include:

• Assessment of industry needs and development of guidelines for verifying savings in existing building commissioning projects (California Commissioning Collaborative, 2008). QuEST is currently leading a follow-on project to develop additional guidelines for other verification methods, case studies, and market outreach activities.
• A senior engineer at QuEST has previously led a successful CEC and PG&E project to develop specifications for development of a tool that assesses the projected uncertainty of savings for different verification methods so that the funds allotted for verifying savings are kept to a reasonable level.
• Under a current project, QuEST is updating the CCC's Energy Charting and Metrics (ECAM) Tool. This spreadsheet-based tool assists engineers to prepare energy data for analysis and quickly identify and assess important building operational issues.
• QuEST has developed the "QuEST Energy Modeling Spreadsheet (QuEMS)," which is a spreadsheet-based tool that helps users input energy use and independent variable data to quickly determine the best regression-based energy model that can be derived from the building or system. The models are based on ASHRAE's energy modeling toolkit (change-point models) that were originally developed under ASHRAE's Research Project 1050.