What is the Building Science Academy?

BSA is a series of in-person or on-demand training sessions that present various building science concepts and topics in bite-sized, easy-to-digest sessions. Increasing your people’s energy IQ is one of the most cost-effective ways to attack high energy consumption. Industry studies demonstrate that regular employee training reliably reduces energy consumption in most sites by 5-10%.

Enhance your teams’ ability to operate your portfolio by taking their building science knowledge to the next level.

BSA for Facility Staff

Buildings are complex, and filled with thousands of devices that must work together if a site is going to operate cleanly, efficiently, and without problems. The more your operators understand about the things that go on behind the walls and above the ceilings, the more effective they will be. BSA turns any style of site personnel into an informed, tech-savvy operator.

BSA for Energy Managers

Most energy management certifications focus on policy and general site operations. This leads to sub-optimal goal-setting and project management when attacking energy consumption. BSA adds the critical ingredient of hard science and engineering to the aresenal of skills that contribute to the energy manager’s success.

BSA for Energy Auditors

Energy audits are big undertakings. Software and other tools abound to make the job easier and faster. But without real understanding of how sites use energy and the machines that consume it, fledgling auditors will forever be at the mercy of these tools. As audits become a mandatory part of building operations, more and more inexperienced auditors are entering the field. BSA provided the extra knowledge and techincal education necessary for producing the best energy audits in the industry.

BSA for Everyone

Energy efficiency, sustainability, and envroinmental stewardship are everyone’s responsbility. Whether it’s the security guard at their station, the custodian keeping the site clean, or the hundreds of other people working in your space, BSA courses can turn each person in your facility into a skilled detective. Hidden policy issues, unseen waste, and mysterious maintenance problems will have nowhere to hide when your entire staff knows what to look for and what to do about it.

Are You Ready to Start?

BSA programs are entirely modular and can be configured to meet the specific goals of each client. Pick your objectives, select your audience, and SRG will design and execute your education plan as you see fit. Contact SRG to discuss your BSA coursework goals.

Start from the beginning with Building Energy Basics.

Why Building Science Literacy Matters: Real-World Lessons from the Field

The case for building science training isn’t abstract. Our field audit work consistently reveals the cost of its absence — and the value of its presence.

The Outdoor Air Problem

Across a recent nine-building institutional portfolio, the most significant recoverable energy savings — by a wide margin — came not from equipment upgrades or lighting retrofits, but from outdoor air management. At five of eight buildings, excessive outdoor air conditioning was identified as the single largest waste category. In one building, three separate AHU anomalies were found during a single walkthrough: one economizer damper physically disconnected since at least 2007, one outdoor air damper stuck closed despite being “scheduled” open, and one unit confirmed running at 100% outdoor air with no recall of how or when that happened.

Each of these conditions has a textbook explanation. Economizer dampers fail or get defeated. Controls sequences break down over time. Pandemic-era ventilation changes get locked in and never revisited. But none of those explanations are useful to a facilities operator who doesn’t know what an economizer does, why OA load matters in heating season, or how to read a balance point on a gas consumption scatter plot. BSA courses on HVAC fundamentals, air-side systems, and controls sequences address exactly these gaps.

Energy Use Intensity: A Number Every Manager Needs to Understand

In a large multi-building corporate campus environment, individual building energy consumption can differ by a factor of 400 or more between the largest and smallest structures on site. A data-intensive office building might consume 1.8 million kWh in a month; a small utility shed might consume 4,000 kWh. Understanding why requires knowing how to read a meter, how to normalize consumption by area, and how to interpret a year-over-year comparison against the same period’s heating or cooling degree days.

Without that baseline literacy, a significant deviation — a new process load, a malfunctioning HVAC unit, a control sequence that stopped resetting overnight setpoints — can persist for months before anyone recognizes it as abnormal. Energy Use Intensity (EUI), expressed in kBtu per square foot per year, is the single most useful normalization tool available to non-engineers. BSA’s Energy Benchmarking module is built around exactly this concept, teaching participants how to calculate EUI, how to compare it to sector benchmarks, and how to use it to set credible reduction targets.

What Well-Trained Facilities Staff Can Catch That Auditors Can’t

Even the most rigorous ASHRAE Level II audit represents a snapshot — typically one to three days of field observation against a backdrop of months or years of utility data. A trained facilities team, operating the building every day, can catch things an audit team never could: the cooling tower that runs for two hours after the building empties, the air handler that consistently fails to reach its morning warmup setpoint, the BAS trend that shows a chiller short-cycling in a way that never showed up in billing data but signals an imminent mechanical failure.

BSA’s curriculum for facility staff is specifically designed to close that gap. By the time a team completes BSA’s core modules on HVAC systems, lighting controls, building automation fundamentals, and utility bill analysis, they are equipped to be the first line of detection — not just the implementation crew for someone else’s recommendations.