Advanced Energy Design Guide for Small to Medium Office Buildings

About this book

The ASHRAE Advanced Energy Design Guides (AEDGs) are a series of practical reference documents providing prescriptive design guidance for achieving significant energy savings above the requirements of ASHRAE Standard 90.1. Developed jointly by ASHRAE, AIA, IESNA, USGBC, and the US Department of Energy, each AEDG targets a specific building type and provides climate-zone-specific recommendations for envelope, lighting, HVAC, and service water heating systems. The guides were first introduced in 2004 for small office buildings, targeting 30 percent energy savings above ASHRAE 90.1-1999.

Subsequent editions progressively raised the target to 50 percent and eventually to net zero energy, while expanding the range of building types covered. The "Advanced Energy Design Guide for Small to Medium Office Buildings" covered in this entry represents one of the most widely used guides, addressing office buildings up to approximately 100,000 square feet. Each guide is organized around the principle of providing recommendations that can be implemented without requiring energy modeling — making advanced energy design accessible to practitioners who may not have energy simulation expertise.

The recommendations are prescriptive: for each climate zone, the guide specifies minimum insulation R-values, maximum window-to-wall ratios, glass solar heat gain coefficients, lighting power densities, HVAC equipment efficiencies, and control requirements that collectively achieve the stated energy savings target. The guides also include "stretch" recommendations for projects seeking even greater energy savings, and case studies illustrating how the recommendations have been implemented in real buildings. They serve as practical design references that bridge the gap between the minimum requirements of building codes and the aspirational targets of green building certification programs.

The AEDG series is freely available from ASHRAE and has been widely used in states and jurisdictions where more prescriptive above-code guidance is needed but mandatory compliance would be premature. Sources: ASHRAE (ashrae.org); US Department of Energy Advanced Energy Design Guide program documentation; PNNL technical reports supporting AEDG development.