Business

The Energy Audit

A 90-minute, 4-round basic Express simulation on a high-school student energy team auditing its own school building for the district's facilities director, from September to January: reading two years of utility bills and the meter's 15-minute interval data, benchmarking the building by kWh per square foot and its

4 rounds Undergraduate English, Español

Preview

About this simulation

A 90-minute, 4-round basic Express simulation on a high-school student energy team auditing its own school building for the district's facilities director, from September to January: reading two years of utility bills and the meter's 15-minute interval data, benchmarking the building by kWh per square foot and its ENERGY STAR score in Portfolio Manager, doing a Level 1 walk-through at night and on a Saturday with the custodial staff, keeping the outdoor air at or above the Ohio Mechanical Code minimum while the building is occupied (OAC 4101:2-4-01; 2021 IMC 403.3.1.3) and cutting the hours it runs for an empty building, ranking efficiency measures by cost, savings and simple payback with no-cost measures first, stating the savings honestly from measured hours with a range and a verification plan, and presenting a phased, funded plan on one page to the board's finance committee, for high-school Career and Technical Education in energy and natural resources, with ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, ASHRAE Level 1 audit concepts and BPI foundations named as hooks.

Imani Brooks, 17, is the fictional student energy-team lead at the fictional Auglaize Bend High School in Wapakoneta, Ohio, in the 2027-28 school year.

Round by round you decide how the baseline is built and what the building is compared with, how the walk-through is done and what to do about the ventilation, how the measures are ranked and how the savings are stated, and how the plan is funded and presented; at each decision point the plan is projected again with the decisions taken so far.

Each round is scored on the verified savings, the extra team hours, the share of savings at risk, the ten-year net savings and the board's confidence, with open violations shown alongside; cutting outdoor air below the code minimum in an occupied school, or knowingly overstating the savings to the board (ORC 2921.13(A)(3); ORC 3313.372(F)), caps the score. English with Spanish.

What participants learn

After the session, participants will be able to:

  • Analyze two years of utility bills and the meter's interval data to find the night and weekend base load, and benchmark the building by kWh per square foot and its ENERGY STAR score
  • Rank efficiency measures by cost, savings and payback, with no-cost schedules first, interactive effects counted and every saving stated as a range from measured hours with a verification plan
  • Design a phased, funded plan in which the cheapest savings pay for the next step, using rebates and capital funds, and present it to a decision-maker on one page
  • Justify keeping ventilation at the code minimum while the building is occupied and cutting outdoor air only in empty hours with an occupied schedule and demand-controlled ventilation
  • Conduct a walk-through audit at the hours the bills point to, with the custodial staff opening panels and going on the roof

Prerequisites

  • Watts, kilowatt-hours and basic heat transfer

Who it is for

An introductory simulation that assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, designed for undergraduate courses. It also works in vocational and high-school programmes and in onboarding sessions.

How a session runs

  1. The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
  2. Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results. The first round opens with: 14 September: the bills and the benchmark.
  3. The simulation can be run in English, Español.
  4. The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.

Decisions participants make

The decisions participants make during the simulation:

  • How the baseline is built
  • What the building is compared with
  • How the walk-through is done
  • The ventilation finding
  • How the measures are ranked
  • How the savings are stated
  • How the plan is funded
  • How the plan is presented

Ready to use The Energy Audit with your students?

Contact us and we'll set you up with a free trial session.

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