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Net-Zero Energy Commercial Building Initiative

Commercial Building Design Guides

Front cover of the ASHRAE Advanced Energy Design Guide for K-12 School Buildings.

The Advanced Energy Design Guides provide suggestions to achieve significant energy savings without cumbersome computer modeling. Guides are available, through ASHRAE, for small offices and retail, warehouses, and K-12 schools.

Here you'll find guides that will help you to achieve specific energy savings and provide a useful overview of sustainable design.

Advanced Energy Design Guides

The U.S. Department of Energy and other key collaborators developed the Advanced Energy Design Guides (AEDGs) to accelerate the construction of highly energy-efficient buildings. These guides provide a prescriptive path to achieve 30% energy savings for small offices and retail buildings, warehouses, and K-12 schools over the minimum code requirements of ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-1999. Visit the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Web site to download these guides at no cost.

The recommendations in the AEDGs are specific to each of the eight U.S. climate zones. They allow those involved in designing or constructing commercial buildings to easily achieve advanced levels of energy savings without having to resort to detailed calculations or analyses.

Visit the ASHRAE Web site to learn more about the AEDGs and to download them:

Share your Project

If you've built an energy-efficient building by following the Advanced Energy Design Guides please let us know. Visit the Submit a Project page of the High Performance Buildings Database to share your success.

Sustainable Design Guide

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) produced a Sustainable Design Guide that describes the issues and design process for 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. Download Adobe Reader.

  • Chapter 1: Sustainable Development - What and Why? (PDF 1 MB)
  • Chapter 2: Whole-Building Design (PDF 2 MB)
  • Chapter 3: Building Siting (PDF 1.4 MB)
  • Chapter 4: The Building Architectural Design (PDF 2.6 MB)
  • Chapter 5: Lighting, HVAC, and Plumbing (PDF 3.3 MB)
  • Chapter 6: Materials (PDF 2.3 MB)
  • Chapter 7: Landscape Design and Management (PDF 2 MB)
  • Chapter 8: Constructing the Building (PDF 1.3 MB)
  • Chapter 9: Commissioning the Building (PDF 1 MB)
  • Chapter 10: Education, Training, and Operation (PDF 797 KB)
  • Appendices (PDF 3.2 MB)