Experience with the use of building commissioning advisor - from design to operation

The increased focus on building energy performance has intensified the need to ensure consistency between energy requirements, design, construction processes and operation in construction projects. With the introduction of the new Danish DS 3090 standard, "The commissioning process in buildings - installations services in new buildings and major renovations" it is expected that this consistency can be ensured. Building Commissioning is a comprehensive quality-assurance process that can be used to ensure and document that a building's systems and installations are designed, installed and tested to comply with the client's requirements. However, experience and knowledge of the impact of the commissioning process on the construction process and the building's performance in practice is still insufficient.
In order to shed light on the role of energy commissioning in construction and on how well it functions, this paper report from the design phase of a large municipal school project in Copenhagen. This project has strict requirements for the building's energy performance, as previous municipal projects have realized a large gap between the calculated energy consumption in the design phase and the actual energy consumption in operation. Hence, Copenhagen Property has chosen to test whether the use of a commissioning adviser can contribute to a process that ensures that operation and use of the building is already mainstreamed in the design stage of the building’s technical systems. The method in the research project is explorative, which means that focus is on the specific use of commissioning in order to learn from the experience and translate it according to Copenhagen Property's long-term strategies, including the need to establish a new internal infrastructure between operations, planning and construction. Drawing on ethnographic methods and theories, this paper will analyse and discuss what the use of a commissioning adviser in the design stage means for the interaction between design and operation. It may seem that "technical solutions" are made before “ongoing learning processes” in which new themes are articulated and understood across the different knowledge boundaries. Since there is a tendency for "technical solutions" to remain after a project, it seems that a solution strategy to
develop standards and new consulting services could lead to increased fragmentation of construction projects.