It is a widely accepted fact that buildings must use less energy and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to help mitigate global climate change. At the same time, buildings are for people: to succeed they must also provide environments that suit their intended occupants. Researchers usually consider these two criteria – reducing GHG emissions and providing good environments for their occupants -- separately despite their close relationship; buildings generally require energy and emit GHGs to produce suitable environments. This building performance case study presents findings about energy use and occupant sentiment together, seeking to uncover new relationships between the two concerns. It considers the designers, owners, operators and occupants’ contributions and relationship to energy use in the California State Teachers Retirement System

(CalSTRS) Headquarters building in West Sacramento, California. More specifically, the study investigates how the design and operations processes contribute to the building’s low source energy use intensity, as indicated by its ENERGY STAR rating of 95, while maintaining high occupant satisfaction ratings for building features and indoor environmental quality (IEQ.) The study reviews these satisfaction ratings in light of the low measured energy intensity.

This report addresses issues commonly observed in green building design and operations; and the recommendations it includes suggest ways to enhance the design process, improve operations efficiency and increase occupant satisfaction. For these reasons, this report is particularly useful to designers of green office buildings and members of organizations that own and/or operate office buildings.

Findings were developed from surveys and interviews of building occupants, building operators, owners’ representatives and facilities staff. These surveys and interviews were performed during spring 2011 and were conducted in close collaboration with Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum (HOK) staff. The project was a collaboration between Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley, and Portland

State University.

The report proceeds as follows. We begin with a description of the building and its physical context, followed by a discussion of the data and methods used. A discussion of findings is next. Findings related to building performance are presented first, followed by findings related to operations. A summary completes the report

This paper reports on analysis of open-ended survey responses in a commercial building occupant indoor environment satisfaction survey database maintained by UC Berkeley. Building on past analyses of Likert-scale satisfaction ratings and categories of dissatisfaction on acoustics, temperature, lighting and overall building and workspace, we use text analysis software to enrich understanding of occupants’ perspectives on what matters about the buildings they work in, and why. These comments detail interactions between occupants and their physical environment, and reflect on expectations, stress, and concerns that lie outside dimension-by-dimension assessments of physical building characteristics. They thus speak to gaps between theories of how buildings work for their occupants and experiences of how they actually do. Together they assert the importance of user-centered views that are currently known through anecdote but poorly incorporated in more clinical or topdown views of building environments.

This paper reports on analysis of open-ended survey responses from a commercial building indoor environment satisfaction survey database maintained by the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment. Building from satisfaction ratings and standardised categorical responses collected in surveys for 192 U.S. office buildings, text analysis software is used to analyse text responses to open-ended survey questions, focusing on occupants’ perspectives on the workplace and building overall, temperature, and acoustics. These occupant texts detail interactions between occupants and their physical environment in a technical sense but also interpret these interactions, assess their consequences, and reflect on social relationships and other matters that lie outside dimension-by-dimension assessments of the physical environment. Viewed together these texts reveal a user-centred perspective that points to issues that rest below the surface of more technical analyses of buildings, such as over airconditioning, worker stress and frustration, workplace usability, and relationships between physical and other aspects of the workplace. Attending to this perspective could lead to improvements in occupant experience, building and technology design, building operations, and survey research, as well as inform initiatives that require occupant adaptation and cooperation, including those for greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

Energy economists have long argued the benefits of real time pricing (RTP) of electricity. Their basis for modeling customers response to short-term fluctuations in electricity prices are based on theories of rational firm behavior, where management strives to minimize operating costs and optimize profit, and labor, capital and energy are potential substitutes in the firm's production function. How well do private firms and public sector institutions operating conditions, knowledge structures, decision-making practices, and external relationships comport with these assumptions and how might this impact price response? We discuss these issues on the basis of interviews with 29 large (over 2 MW) industrial, commercial, and institutional customers in the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation service territory that have faced day-ahead electricity market prices since 1998. We look at stories interviewees told about why and how they respond to RTP, why some customers report that they can't, and why even if they can, they don't. Some firms respond as theorized, and we describe their load curtailment strategies. About half of our interviewees reported that they were unable to either shift or forego electricity consumption even when prices are high ($0.50/kWh). Reasons customers gave for why they weren't price-responsive include implicit value placed on reliability, pricing structures, lack of flexibility in adjusting production inputs, just-in-time practices, perceived barriers to onsite generation, and insufficient time. We draw these observations into a framework that could help refine economic theory of dynamic pricing by providing real-world descriptions of how firms behave and why.