An investigation of the design process's effect on a high-performance building's actual energy system performance

The design intent and the performance targets of projects may sometimes fail to match a building’s actual post-occupancy performance. The mismatch of intended and actual building performance can be attributed to multifarious reasons. This study focuses on the role of project decisions made during design as one of the reasons of shortfall. The aim of the study is to unveil the design decision-making process of a state-of-the-art research building through the analysis of project’s available set of IDP (Integrated Design Process) documentation. To understand the relationship and correlation between the energy performance gap and the decision-making process of the case building, we investigated the design decisions’ effect on the actual performance. The particular emphasis is on the decisions that were based on assumptions rather than measured actual test data for the proposed innovative building systems. The designed heat recovery system, which was dependent on recovered heat from the neighboring research building, had a significant effect on the building’s poor energy performance. We investigated collected project data from coordination meetings, thoroughly analyzed project documentation, and quantified the building’s actual energy performance data. The analysis of the project information shows the ripple effect of decisions that were made based on assumptions, that triggered shortfalls in the building’s overall actual performance. Our qualitative analysis indicates that the poor system performance during operations was related with the design decisions that were not based on the measurement of the actual performance of the existing systems in the neighboring building. The performance of the heat recovery from the neighboring building as a highly dependent Energy Conservation Measure (ECM) analyzed through collected documents and data. The ambiguity of the available heat potential from the neighboring building and related testing issues defined on an explanatory timeline of process coding. The conclusion includes recommendations for the design decision-making process for innovative system integrations for high-performance buildings, and underlines the importance of IDP for complex buildings.