ABSTRACT
Once upon a time, a visionary named Edward Stephen encouraged an engineer named Goody Taylor to survey four schools in Fairfax County, Virginia, to see if there might be some way for the school district to cut its utility bills. The year was 1962. The term energy audit had yet to be invented but the thought had been born. Cheap and available energy, however, caused this strange, innovative idea to languish for more than a decade. Few facility managers, at the time, had any idea as to what types of equipment could, and should, be operated more efficiently. And it would have cost more for the Goody Taylors of that era to survey our buildings than people probably would have recovered in utility savings. Through the years, the audit has become more sophisticated and more inclusive, but until recently it retained its “snap shot” characteristics, making predictive consistency challenging at best.
