Small and medium-sized commercial buildings (SMCBs) are most of the US commercial building stock, yet most have no automation system and run on standalone thermostats and fixed schedules. This report documents the design and laboratory validation of a low-cost building energy management system (BEMS) developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and configured for an occupied medical clinic in Yuma, Arizona. The BEMS replaces the standalone thermostats on 11 single-stage heat-pump rooftop units, adds circuit-level power metering, and is configured rather than hard-coded for each building. The complete device set, 11 thermostats, 5 power meters, and network devices, was validated in the laboratory. Every configured device returned its data points; all 879 remote commands were confirmed by reading the values back at the device; occupant changes at a keypad paused and released automated control; and each commanded change energized the correct control output. The configuration is written once per device type, and the effort grows with the variety of equipment rather than the number of devices. Additionally, on-site installation needs only local electricians and HVAC technicians. Collectively, these make the BEMS deployment practical for SMCBs that conventional systems cannot serve affordably.

Pacific Northwest and Oak Ridge National Laboratories jointly developed a supervisory controller kit for small and medium-sized commercial buildings (SC-SMB), demonstrating 20%–25% electricity savings at about $7,700 per 10,000 ft² deployment. U.S. small and medium industrial (SMI) facilities show a parallel control gap, with only 16% of motor systems under variable-frequency drive control and only 3% of refrigeration systems scheduling setpoints to production. That transfer has not been established, since SMI facilities differ in protocols, process thermal loads, and multi-vendor equipment. This report reviews 61 papers across six manufacturing industries, namely food, fabricated metal, plastics, machinery, motor vehicle parts, and printing, and three end-uses, namely compressed air, process thermal, and HVAC, supported by two interviews with a domain expert in industrial energy efficiency. Extension is technically feasible, with most documented savings reachable through low-cost supervisory controls. Sensing is the dominant capability gap, as instrumentation of major end-uses ranges from 3% to 26%. Compressed air is the strongest retrofit candidate at 30%–50% savings, process thermal offers the largest potential but requires substantial control-logic development, and HVAC requires the least modification. Case studies of similarly sized plants report paybacks of 2.4 years or less, supporting full-scale development.