Energy efficiency has been the flavor of the month when it comes to building projects as cities try to curtail their energy usage to more sustainable levels. The problem has been, to become more energy efficient, detailed information about how and when cities, and the buildings they are composed of, consume electricity and heating fuel. In other words, it is hard to do a comparison without having at least two things to compare.
The city of Boston, however, no longer has to worry about lacking current, detailed information on its energy usage throughout a given day or throughout the year, with an emphasis on detailed.
Researchers at the MIT Sustainable Design Lab (SDL) and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, in collaboration with the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), have a shiny new toy to use to help plan for the city’s energy future, MIT News reports.
This shiny new toy comes in the form of a “citywide urban building energy model of unprecedented scale and spatio-temporal detail.” For every single building in Boston, nearly 100,000 in total, the new energy modeling tool estimates the gas and electricity demand for every single hour of a given year. This amount of detail has never been incorporated into a model of a city the size and scope of Boston.
The model will be used in an effort to help make Boston’s energy system more efficient, resilient, and affordable.
The team of researchers behind the project sifted through all 92,000 buildings in Boston and sorted them into 48 “archetypes” and 12 usage categories. Then, each archetype was assigned characteristics relating to things like heating and cooling systems, electricity use, thermostat settings, time, occupancy, and wall and roof structure, among others, MIT News reports.
In order to make all of this information and data useable for energy planning it required creating a lot of algorithms to work with incomplete datasets. While this took a long time to complete, it has the benefit of allowing the tool to be adapted, as opposed to reinvented, by others who may be interested in doing similar analyses throughout the northeast.
The modeling tool has already helped to identify sites throughout Boston where “a combination of CHP, photovoltaic, battery storage, and ground source heat pumps could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and offer lower-cost alternatives to current centralized energy supply scenarios,” according to MIT News.
The end goal of this project is to allow for every city, worldwide, to be able to use a citywide energy model to manage its complicated web of energy supply and carbon emissions.
Related Stories
| Sep 22, 2010
Satellier, Potential + Semac close investment deal
Satellier, a world leader in providing CAD and Building Information Modeling (BIM) outsourced services to the architecture, engineering and construction industry, announces a strategic minority investment from India-based top engineering firm Potential + Semac, ushering in the next evolution of the global architecture support industry.
| Sep 13, 2010
Data Centers Keeping Energy, Security in Check
Power consumption for data centers doubled from 2000 and 2006, and it is anticipated to double again by 2011, making these mission-critical facilities the nation's largest commercial user of electric power. With major technology companies investing heavily in new data centers, it's no wonder Building Teams see these mission-critical facilities as a golden opportunity, and why they are working hard to keep energy costs at data centers in check.
| Sep 13, 2010
3D Prototyping Goes Low-cost
Today’s less costly 3D color printers are attracting the attention of AEC firms looking to rapidly prototype designs and communicate design intent to clients.
| Aug 11, 2010
Nemetschek North America Announces New U.S. Partnership with Apple
Nemetschek North America (NNA) has entered a new partnership with Apple in the United States. Under the terms of this partnership, three of NNA's Vectorworks software products can now be purchased through the U.S. online Apple Store. Vectorworks and ArchiCAD, another Nemetschek product, are the only BIM programs available for the Mac platform.
| Aug 11, 2010
Turner edges out Perkins+Will for the top spot on BD+C's Top 200 Building Team LEED APs ranking
With 1,006 LEED Accredited Professionals on staff, Turner Construction took the top spot on Building Design+Construction’s 2009 ranking of AEC firms with the most LEED APs, published as part of the Giants 300 report. Turner added more than 580 LEED APs during the past year to surpass Perkins+Will, which held the top spot four years running.
| Aug 11, 2010
Guggenheim and Google team up on shelter design competition
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Google yesterday announced the launch of Design It: Shelter Competition, a global, online initiative that invites the public to use Google Earth and Google SketchUp to create and submit designs for virtual 3-D shelters for a location of their choice anywhere on Earth. The competition opened on June 8, 2009, in honor of Frank Lloyd Wright’s birthday, and closes to submissions on August 23.
| Aug 11, 2010
EwingCole to merge with healthcare specialist Robert D. Lynn Associates
EwingCole, a nationally recognized architectural, engineering, interior design, and planning firm with more than 320 professionals, today announced that it will combine its practice with Robert D. Lynn Associates of Philadelphia, a 40-person firm with a robust portfolio of healthcare projects. The combination will create the Delaware Valley¹s largest and most comprehensive firm with an emphasis on healthcare architecture, and a national scope and presence.
| Aug 11, 2010
Jacobs, Arup, AECOM top BD+C's ranking of the nation's 75 largest international design firms
A ranking of the Top 75 International Design Firms based on Building Design+Construction's 2009 Giants 300 survey. For more Giants 300 rankings, visit http://www.BDCnetwork.com/Giants
| Aug 11, 2010
BIM adoption rate exceeds 80% among nation’s largest AEC firms
The nation’s largest architecture, engineering, and construction companies are on the BIM bandwagon in a big way, according to Building Design+Construction’s premier Top 170 BIM Adopters ranking, published as part of the 2009 Giants 300 survey. Of the 320 AEC firms that participated in Giants survey, 83% report having at least one BIM seat license in house, and nearly a quarter (23%) have 100-plus seats.
