Advanced Energy Design Guides

Advanced Energy Design Guide – Achieving Zero Energy

The Advanced Energy Design Guide—Achieving Zero Energy series provides a cost-effective approach to achieve advanced levels of energy savings. The guides offer contractors and designers the tools, including recommendations for practical products and off-the-shelf technology, needed for achieving zero energy, which is defined as a building that, on an annual basis, draws from outside resources equal or less energy than it provides using on-site renewable energy sources. Download them for free from ASHRAE:

Advanced Energy Design Guides – 50 Percent

The 50% AEDGs provide practical approaches to achieve 50% energy savings compared to base code requirements. Download them free from ASHRAE:

The Advanced Energy Design Guides (AEDGs) accelerate the construction of energy-efficient buildings by providing prescriptive solutions to achieve significant energy savings over minimum building energy codes. The AEDG project represents a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), ASHRAE, American Institute of Architects, U.S. Green Building Council, and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES). The AEDG series provides design guidance for buildings that use 50% less energy than those built to the requirements of the ANSI/ASHRAE/IES Standard 90.1-2004 commercial code,  and are specific to prominent building types across each of the eight U.S. climate zones.

Image of the cover of the Advanced Energy Design Guide for Small to Medium Office Buildings.

Using the AEDGs, those involved with designing or constructing commercial buildings can easily achieve higher levels of energy savings using available technologies and without requiring detailed energy calculations or analyses.

The EnergyPlus models from the AEDGs for achieving 50% savings are available on the Commercial Buildings Resource Database.

The previous series of guides to achieve 30% savings (based on ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-1999) is available for small office buildings, small retail buildings, small warehouses and self-storage buildings, highway lodging, hospitals/healthcare, and K-12 schools.

Read a fact sheet about the AEDGs or review ASHRAE's frequently asked questions.

Strategies for 50% Energy Savings

DOE, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory developed recommendations on how to achieve up to 50% energy savings in a variety of commercial building types. These reports will provide the basis for the next series of Advanced Energy Design Guides, which are "how-to" guides that show architects, engineers, and building designers how to achieve above-code exemplary energy performance for buildings using existing technologies available today.

View the 50% Energy Savings Technical Support Documents for the following building types:

Sustainable Design Guide

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) produced a Sustainable Design Guide that describes the issues and design process for 50% more energy-efficient buildings and the added value that sustainable design can provide in architecture, facility construction, operation, and maintenance.

The following documents are available as Adobe Acrobat PDFs.