Enter the California Energy Commission, which, through its Public Interest Energy Research Program (PIER), funded a set of computer simulations and field testing to determine the conditions under which DCV is most likely to be cost-effective, verify the savings potential, and identify problems that might crop up in the application of DCV (Figure 1).
The overall PIER program aims to decrease building energy use through research that develops or improves energy-efficient technolo-gies, strategies, tools, and building performance evaluation methods. The project was managed for PIER by Architectural Energy Corp. and carried out by researchers at Purdue University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Results showed that significant savings are possible (Table 1).