Overview

As a facility manager, the AOC maintains 17.4M sf of space that includes the U.S. Capitol Building and Grounds, Senate and House Office Buildings, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Botanic Garden, and related support facilities and the grounds of the Capitol Complex in Washington, DC as well as support facilities in Maryland and Virginia. Under the Energy Policy Act (EPACT) of 2005 and the Energy Independence and Security Act (EIS) of 2007, the AOC was mandated to pursue energy, water, and carbon reductions targets for these facility assets, including a 30% campus-wide energy consumption reduction goal by 2023, and to provide annual progress reports to Congress.

In 2006, Entech was asked to develop the initial AOC Energy and Water Conservation Report for Congressional submission, based on the Department of Energy reporting criteria. To support this effort, we provided energy planning and consulting services to the AOC, drawing upon a wealth of collected information from facility condition assessments, energy audits, historic preservation surveys, and utility performance studies that were conducted under our direction, to provide the AOC a holistic view of its sustainability, energy, and water conservation initiatives. Through our comprehensive energy planning and consulting services, we supported the AOC in its energy initiatives; through our ability to translate technical information into a report understandable to lay audiences, we assisted the AOC in clearly communicating its initiatives and results in its first issued report to Congress and in each of the subsequent annual reports that we developed throughout a five year period.

We collected and validated baseline data to establish existing energy and water consumption levels for targeted AOC buildings, data that did not exist outside of the Capitol Power Plant due to a lack of sub-metering. Our collaboration with key personnel in the AOC’s Design Services and Project Management groups and the management team at the Capitol Power Plant yielded both the 2003 baseline data as well as the annual consumption for all subsequent years.

We then provided a narrative outlining the steps AOC was taking to meet Congressional energy and water conservation goals, incorporating data we had collected through a Facility Condition Assessment we had previously conducted for the AOC’s Facility Planning and Programming Division. This assessment had included life-cycle analysis and proposed energy related capital improvements that we used to create a model annual energy plan, which in turn provided a basis for the AOC Annual Energy and Water Conservation Report.

To take advantage of some of the potential energy conservation opportunities presented in our report for the U.S. Capitol Building and the Senate and House Office Buildings, the AOC hired two Energy Service Companies (ESCOs), Ameresco and Noresco, to provide Investment Grade Audits (IGAs), recommend specific Energy Conservation Measures (ECMs), and design and implement the recommended projects. To assist the AOC in driving the ESCO process, we were asked to provide parallel ASHRAE Level III Audits, including 8760 Building Simulations, to verify the ESCO’s modeling and calculations and to confirm the energy savings that were being achieved at these facilities as well as at the chilled water and central steam plants.

The data generated through this effort was then incorporated into the Annual Report, demonstrating the AOC’s progress and momentum for meeting the goals. Our Report expanded to include various sustainability efforts being undertaken by the individual jurisdictions within the AOC. We conducted a series of interviews with newly identified sustainability officers for each jurisdiction to collect and disseminate their best practices and current and future initiatives.