Written report accompanying the DOE prototype models

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Background on the DOE Prototype buildings

The DOE prototype buildings, formerly known as the commercial reference buildings are a joint effort between NREL, PNNL, LBNL to assess national savings potential for new building technologies and model savings for new versions of building code, among other uses.

They were first released under this report: NREL, U.S. Department of Energy Commercial Reference Building Models of the National Building Stock, February 2011.

PNNL expanded the reference buildings to estimate savings from implementing ASHRAE 90.1-2010: PNNL, Achieving the 30% Goal: Energy and Cost Savings Analysis of ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2010, May 2011. These are the original DOE Prototype Building .idf models.

PNNL then made enhancements to these models to better reflect the building stock and implement ASHRAE 90.1 items that were not included in the original prototype models: PNNL, Enhancements to ASHRAE Standard 90.1 Prototype Building Models, April 2014. This is the document you want to reference for the current inputs to the DOE Prototype models.

openstudio-standards

openstudio-standards was developed to create the DOE Prototype Building models in OpenStudio format programmatically. This way, any fixes or updates to the prototype models can be implemented in openstudio-standards, and are reflected in the prototype models it builds. This saves the need to update hundreds of .idf files individually and avoids transcription errors. It also allows the prototype models to be used in OpenStudio workflows with measures or programatic analysis in PAT, making it much easier to use the models for their intended use case - modeling building technology and building code savings.

The PNNL .idf files are currently the gold standard and are used for building energy code analysis; the .osm prototype models generated with openstudio-standards are imperfect. However, openstudio-standards is currently being updated as a joint effort between NREL and PNNL to make sure the models match the PNNL .idf files more closely. At present, models built with the Create DOE Prototype Building measure reflect the 2014 PNNL enhancements to the prototype building models, with some fixes to known HVAC errors. You can see a complete changelog in the commit history of openstudio-standards, or reference the abridged openstudio-standards changelog notes included with each release of OpenStudio.