San Francisco BayREN: Integrated Commercial Retrofits Award Number: DE-EE0007558 CX(s) Applied: A9, A11 Building Technologies Office Date: 8/18/2016 Location(s): CA Office(s): Golden Field Office
Office of NEPA Policy and Compliance
September 8, 2016
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San Francisco BayREN: Integrated Commercial Retrofits
Award Number: DE-EE0007558
CX(s) Applied: A9, A11
Building Technologies Office
Date: 8/18/2016
Location(s): CA
Office(s): Golden Field Office
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is proposing to provide federal funding to the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) to develop tools to reduce the cost of targeting, design, and project development for energy-efficiency improvements by enhancing and integrating existing open-source tools for: large-scale building energy analysis for project targeting; rapidly drafting proposal scenarios for deep and serial improvements; energy performance and building attribute data management; and provision of program data to providers of innovative financing products and energy technologies. This DOE project is fundamentally focused on development of these tools. While DOE does expect to see a certain level of energy savings from the installation of energy retrofits that may follow from project activities, no project funding is going toward the energy retrofits and the DOE has no control or discretion over what specific types of energy retrofits may be selected for installation or which business owners or commercial facilities may choose to install those energy retrofits. As such, DOE’s NEPA review is limited to the scope of the DOE funded project.
DOE funded activities associated with the proposed project would include development of contract terms, communication plans, data inventory, and modeling, targeting and proposal tools; large-scale energy modeling; energy-efficiency assessments and implementation of the targeting and proposal tool; evaluation, measurement, and verification of the efficacy of improvements; development of a plan for scaling up; and reporting. These activities would be completed from ABAG and San Francisco Department of the Environment (SFE) offices located in San Francisco, CA. Most of the project activities consist of intellectual, academic, or analytical activities only. Energy assessments/audits could require the recipient or project partners to perform site visits at locations within each market, but project activities do not require any physical modification of facilities, ground disturbing activities, or installation of equipment outdoors. The exact locations of where energy assessments/audits would occur are not known at this time, but based on the activities proposed, would have no potential to cause effects to historic properties, assuming they were present; therefore, DOE has no further obligations under section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. DOE does not anticipate any impacts to resources of concern due to the proposed activities of the project.