Centrica Technology Partnership

NREL's Commercial Buildings Research Infrastructure, in partnership with Centrica Technology, fast-track scalable solutions for energy use, generation, and storage among buildings and the larger electric grid.

The U.S. General Services Administration discovered potential for even greater cost and energy savings throughout its entire portfolio with the help of NREL's Commercial Buildings Research Infrastructure facility.

The U.S. General Services Administration conducted a field test for the new circuit-level analytics and submetering platform (CLASP) to analyze building panel efficiency. The technology monitors individual circuits within a building's electrical panel and provides detailed analytics reports for energy efficiency.

Following this stage of research, energy provider Centrica Technology discovered a software bug that altered the data export. Centrica fixed the software bug, and The U.S. General Services Administration teamed up with NREL to reevaluate CLASP capabilities in a focused laboratory validation, using actual commercial loads at the Commercial Buildings Research Infrastructure facility. Described as a flight simulator for commercial buildings, the Commercial Buildings Research Infrastructure integrates hardware and the virtual environment to evaluate technologies in a flexible and reconfigurable manner.

The laboratory tools and features allowed NREL to characterize the CLASP data in minimal time and without the need for an expensive additional field deployment. As a result, Centrica was informed on how to improve its meter accuracy, and the findings highlighted the ability of CLASP to drive significant savings through future data analytics.

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