Building decarbonization will be a major contributor to achieving sustainability both in terms of environmental emissions as well as reducing the cost of utility bills for customers. It will also soon be a requirement in certain cities and states to retrofit buildings to meet energy consumption benchmarks and targets. I want to provide a basic tool to allow building owners and general users to understand their building’s embodied and operational carbon usage and understand what measures they can take in order to increase the sustainability of their building. I imagine this tool should be simple enough to allow for those who are not familiar with building systems to input known information such as floor area, floor-to-ceiling height, window-to-wall ratio, and site location. I want the tool to give users an idea of how much energy they could conserve by implementing energy saving measures such as increasing insulation and incorporating on site energy generation. Due to time constraints I will limit my scope to just PV installation for energy saving measures.
Intended users: general public, building/homeowners looking to implement PV on their properties
Need: reduce load on the grid, increase on site energy generation
Inputs: building length, width, height, number of stories, floor-to-ceiling height, construction material, window-to-wall ratio, site location
Underlying logic:
- Generate a building massing form based on given inputs
- Generate floor area - estimate current energy use based on site location EUI averages
- Conduct solar analysis - maximize surface area (non-window facade area, roof) available to implement PV (assume 70% coverage and 20% panel efficiency) - though panels are not usually placed on facades, strategic placement of the facades on certain directions of the buildings can help generate appropriate amounts of energy throughout the day.
- Calculate cost estimates for implementing PV systems based on site location averages
- Calculate potential savings from the Inflation Reduction Act
- cost estimates will come from national averages
Output:
- Revit generated form
- Current energy usage (from average EUI)
- Reduction of energy usage / EUI from implementing solar PV
- Estimated cost of implementation of PV, and savings
In summary: a tool to estimate energy generation by wrapping your existing building in PV