Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Quality assurance and optimization are essential elements of any serious technological endeavor, including efforts to improve energy efficiency. Commissioning is an important tool in this respect. The aim of commissioning new buildings is to ensure that they deliver-if not exceed-the performance and energy savings promised by their design. When applied to existing buildings, one-time or repeated commissioning (often called retrocommissioning) identifies the almost inevitable drift in energy performance and puts the building back on course, often surpassing the original design intent. In both contexts, commissioning is a systematic, forensic approach to improving performance, rather than a discrete technology.