Figure 1. The PG&E Energy Center Facade (60K jpg).

For the last five years, the Building Science Group at U. C. Berkeley has worked with the Pacific Gas & Electric Company on the design and ongoing operation of the PG&E Energy Center. This ebb and flow has involved the service of our recent graduates on the Center's Tech staff, reciprocal access to facilities, and an ongoing role for Prof. Charles Benton in the Center's activities. It has been an interesting enterprise.

page links:
premise of the center | the PEC as an academy 
the PEC as a toolbox | the PEC as an advisor

Premise of the Center

Figure 2. The California Collaborative as represented by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, CEO Richard Clarke of PG&E , and Ralph Cavanaugh of the Natural Resources Defense Council (47K jpg)

For a decade the country's domestic power utilities have been active agents in the promotion of energy conservation. From their perspective, efforts to lure customers toward the wiser use of energy are more palatable than the rigors of building new generating plants. Utility encouragement for energy conservation comes in the form of Demand-Side Management (DSM) programs, focused efforts to shape behavior on the consumer side of the meter. Pacific Gas & Electric, the nation's largest utility, has been particularly active in the DSM arena with programs ranging from energy information labels to rebates on high performance windows. Among the most interesting, and speculative, of PG&E's efforts is the PG&E Energy Center (PEC), a workshop created to assist local building professionals in matters of energy-efficiency. Given that buildings in California consume 60% of the state's electricity, this service seems well targeted. The utility hopes that conservation engendered by the PEC will be the equivalent of a power plant, providing long-term benefits for PG&E, the design professions, their clients, and ultimately, the environment.

The PEC emerged from a collaborative process involving the California utilities, regulatory agencies, and environmental advocacy groups. Guided by an advisory committee of design practitioners, academics, building scientists, utility managers, and environmental advocates, the center's program coalesced around the roles of academy, toolbox, and advisor. In 1990, PG&E selected a 32,000 ft2 storefront site in San Francisco's South-of-Market District, placing the PEC within a 30-minute travel radius of over 50% of the region's architects, engineers, and facility managers.

The PEC as an Academy

Figures 3 & 4. The PEC offers a set of exemplary classrooms for instruction in building science and these are well used. The Electric Lighting Classroom (right, 47K jpg) provides experiential demonstrations of lighting topics from basic to advanced. On the left, workshop participants build a daylighting model for subsequent testing (33K jpg).

Since opening in December 1991, the PEC has hosted over 30,000 visits by building professionals and their clients. In the role of academy, the center has presented over two hundred seminars and lectures on energy conservation topics. Offered without charge, these programs range from brown-bag lunch presentations by building scientists from neighboring Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to multiday courses on electric lighting fundamentals staged by the Illuminating Engineering Society. The PEC provides a superb instructional setting with specialized classrooms for electric lighting, HVAC systems, and other topics that are the envy of visiting academics. In addition, classes are supported by a system of permanent and rotating exhibits demonstrating topics from first order principles to the latest energy efficient hardware. Perhaps the greatest endorsement for this continuing education program comes in a consistently high demand for the center's offerings - workshops fill within days of their announcement.

The PEC as a toolbox

Figure 5. An ACR electrical current datalogger, one of over 100 types of measurement instrument in the PG&E Lending Library of Instrumentation (35K jpg)

As a toolbox the PEC provides "backoffice" facilities previously available to few practitioners. Examples include two mock-up spaces with ceiling heights, interior finishes, fenestration, and electric lighting that adjust to allow full-scale, experiential comparison of design alternatives. The PEC's custom-built Heliodon, a machine that recreates the sun-earth relationship, has been used by architects to examine shading patterns and solar access in over 200 projects to date. Designers explore daylighting issues using a rooftop station featuring photometric instrumentation and time-lapse video for recording light patterns in scale study models. Professionals interested in building diagnostics borrow from the fine collection of data acquisition equipment in the PEC's Lending Library of Instrumentation.

The PEC as an advisor

As an advisor, the PEC offers technical staff for consultation regarding project-specific questions. In particular, the center encourages review during the schematic design stage and on issues related to building commissioning. Patrons also have access to the Resource Center, a multidisciplinary library of technical literature staffed by two research librarians.

With relatively little precedent, the development of the PG&E Energy Center has been an interesting endeavor. After 30 months of operation, its value is established as a locus for information exchange on energy efficiency in buildings. Similar centers are now opening in other areas of the country and more are planned. This bodes well for energy conservation.