Skip to Content
U.S. Department of Energy Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

Commercial Building Design Guides

Front cover of the ASHRAE Advanced Energy Design Guide for Small and Medium Office Buildings.

The 50% AEDGs provide practical approaches to achieve 50% energy savings compared to base code requirements.

Download them free from ASHRAE:

  • Small and Medium Office Buildings
  • K-12 School Buildings
  • Medium to Big Box Retail Buildings

The guides on this page will help you to achieve specific energy savings and provide a useful overview of sustainable design. These guides are the product of ongoing research by the Commercial Building Initiative to help meet the program's goal of advancing technologies and systems that reduce the energy consumption of commercial buildings.

Advanced Energy Design Guides

The Advanced Energy Design Guides (AEDGs) accelerate the construction of energy efficient buildings by providing a prescriptive path 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 (IESNA).

The recommendations in the AEDGs are specific to each of the eight U.S. climate zones. Using the AEDGs, those involved with designing or constructing commercial buildings can easily achieve advanced levels of energy savings without running detailed calculations or analyses.

The AEDG series provides design guidance for buildings that use 50% less energy than those built to the requirements of the ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2004 commercial code. The AEDGs for achieving 50% savings in Small and Medium Office Buildings, K-12 School Buildings, and Medium to Big Box Retail Buildings, are all available for free download from ASHRAE. An additional 50% guide for large hospitals will be released over the next 12 months.

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

Visit www.ashrae.org/freeaedg to download these guides at no cost. For more information, read a fact sheet about the AEDGs or review ASHRAE's frequently asked questions.

Share your Project

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

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.