Seminar 29 -- Urban-Scale Building Energy Modeling, Part 5

Track: Commissioning: Optimizing New and Existing Buildings and their Operation
Sponsor: 1.5 Computer Applications, 4.7 Energy Calculations
Chair: Bass Abushakra, Ph.D., Member, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY
Development of urban-scale building energy models is becoming increasingly tractable for many applications including city-wide energy supply/demand strategies, urban development planning, electrical grid stability, and urban resilience. This seminar has assembled several researchers with capabilities in the field of urban-scale energy models to discuss an overview of the field as well as the data, algorithms, workflow, and practical challenges addressed in their applications involving creation of useful models of individual buildings at the scale of a city, urban, or metropolitan area.

1. Automatic Building Energy Model Creation (AutoBEM)
Joshua New, Ph.D., Member, ONRL, Oak Ridge, TN
National labs, universities, and industry are all developing significant capabilities for urban-scale building energy modeling…once a virtual city is constructed. To construct the models, most rely on local data sources that work at the scale of a city or county (such as a tax assessor's database) or flyover of the area of interest, but do not use data sources or algorithms that would scale to areas the size of a metropolis, state, or entire country. This presentation will show recent advances in scalable capabilities for automatically creating fully-articulated OpenStudio and EnergyPlus models of individual buildings for any area of interest.

2. Simplified Estimation of Energy Use Intensity Based on Building Façade Features
Joon-Ho Choi, Ph.D., Associate Member, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
A building's façade is a major element that accounts for 70% of building energy performance. Compared with the internal mechanical system and operation schedule, façade features information is relatively easy to obtain from the visual aspects of a building. Instead of using traditional and complicated simulation methods, a mathematical model can be established to estimate EUI baselines based on sufficient existing building practices data. This prediction modeling approach will provide a more realistic EUI estimation tool for calculating an energy use baseline and will enable real-time energy usage monitoring and management of each targeted building.

3. Retrofitting District-Scale Buildings to Cut Energy Use By 50%: A Case Study
Yixing Chen, Ph.D., Associate Member and Tianzhen Hong, Ph.D., Member, LBNL, Berkeley, CA
Buildings in cities consume 30 to 70% of the cities' total primary energy. Retrofitting the existing building stock to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy use is necessary to reduce green-house-gas emissions and mitigate climate change. We present a case study on district-scale energy retrofit analysis using CityBES, a web-based toolkit developed by LBNL. Two retrofit scenarios are studied: evaluating energy savings and cost of typical energy conservation measures (ECMs) for a portfolio of hundreds of buildings in downtown San Francisco; and optimizing a package of ECMs that can achieve 50% energy savings for all buildings in the district.

Presented: June 26, 2017, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM
Run Time: 60 min.

This is a zip file that consists of PowerPoint slides synchronized with the audio-recording of the speaker (recorded presentation), PDF files of the slides, and audio only (mp3) for each presentation.