Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Surveys Building Operators

Berkeley LabIf you or someone you know operates a commercial building, don’t miss this opportunity to make your voice heard. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) wants to get to the bottom of how you feel about adjusting building services to temporarily lower electricity usage in response to grid needs. If your utility asked you to tweak your thermostat, adjust your lights, or manipulate some other aspect of your building’s energy profile for a few hours, what would you prefer to do? To what extent would larger payments from the utility motivate you to cut back more on your electricity usage?

Berkeley, California  – Berkeley Lab is conducting a short survey to learn how commercial building operators value different conditions, such as temperature and lighting, that could change when a building is called on to for demand response (i.e., to modify its electricity use for a few hours to support the U.S. electric grid). Such modifications could help the grid become more resilient and sustainable.  

If you operate office or stand-alone retail buildings, or advise on their operation, please help the Lab by clicking the link below to take a survey. No prior experience with demand response programs is necessary to participate, all responses are anonymous, and you can exit the survey at any time. In return for your help, the Lab will share the products of the research, including a prototype decision-support tool that the survey results will inform.

Please take the survey! 

Feel free to forward this request to others, as the Lab is seeking a large number of respondents in a short amount of time in order to be successful. The survey is scheduled to close on March 14, 2020. 

For more information, please see: https://seeds.lbl.gov/dr-decisions-for-buildings/. If you have any questions or suggestions, please email us at [email protected]

Thank you for your help!!

More Details

Timing:The survey takes 15-20 minutes to complete and does not have to be finished in one sitting.

Funding: The project is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-LC-000L048. 

Team composition: The principal investigator is Jared Langevin of the Building Technology Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The survey research team consists of Margaret Taylor; Jeff Deason; Jingjing Zhang; Hung-Chia Yang; and Samuel Fernandes.