Project Team
Student(s)
Nusaybah Estes
Engineering & Environmental Studies
Swarthmore College
Mentor(s)
Penn State Architectural Engineering
Penn State Architectural Engineering
Project Video
Project Abstract
Climate change will drastically affect environmental inputs key to building performance, including weather patterns and grid makeup. Previous studies have considered building optimization under present conditions, however, there is a need to understand building performance in future grid scenarios. Our research this summer has begun to explore future simulations for commercial building models in representative locations across several code years. Our preliminary study focused on simulations done on the Department of Energy’s small office building model. Here we used Chicago as our representative location and corresponding future grid projections were pulled from NREL’s Renewable Electricity Futures study. We looked at how marginal carbon emissions compared between 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019 building code years using 2004 as the baseline. Analyzing the results we could see several hours where older code years had lower carbon intensity than newer code years, however, this pattern did not occur frequently or intensely enough to have an effect on monthly or annual trends. Regardless, this initial study suggests there is more to understand in how future environmental inputs affect the performance of various building types. Next steps could include simulating other building model types provided by the DOE, seeing how future grid data and future weather data combined affect these outputs, and comparing the effects of intelligent controllers to improvements in building code.
Project Poster
https://sites.psu.edu/climatedrawdown2020/files/formidable/6/Drawdown-Poster-1.pdf