Building Decarbonization: Key Issues and Solutions for Occupancy, Wellness and Sustainability

Abstract:

As the climate change impacts of building construction and operation become clearer and clearer, building designers, architects and engineers, need to take immediate action. Sustainable buildings are crucial to our future. The understanding of the carbon content of what makes up buildings, both embodied and operational, is essential. There are numerous decisions that must be made in the process of visioning and designing a building to reduce carbon content while improving the environment in which we spend most of our time.

Learning Objectives:

• Define what “decarbonizing” a building project means, including explaining key terms such as “embodied carbon” and “net zero carbon”.
• Use key approaches in building design, material selection and specification to reduce the embodied carbon in the building envelope and structure.
• Employ beneficial electrification to reduce buildings’ operational carbon dioxide emissions and improve wellness of building occupants.
• Design to meet building performance standards as more local jurisdictions adopt these practices to meet community greenhouse gas emission reduction goals and improve wellness of building occupants.

Sponsored by: NEO Net Energy Optimizer & B3 Benchmarking

NEO | Net Energy Optimizer® and B3 Benchmarking are a suite of automated tools that work together to optimize building energy savings opportunities and perform a comprehensive economic and emissions reduction evaluation of those opportunities. NEO for Building Simulation The NEO modeling tool calculates energy savings for 40+ building types, 150+ HVAC systems and 250+ operational and capital improvement measures to identify an optimal bundle of decarbonization strategies with financial paybacks. NEO is used for 100+ utility EE programs and has been vetted by EM&V consultants in 17 states. B3 Benchmarking for Building Assessment B3 provides physics-based modeling to identify savings probabilities in existing buildings. By identifying the 20% of buildings with 80% of portfolio-level savings opportunities, stakeholders not only spend energy dollars wisely but also determine how much decarbonization can be achieved through energy efficiency verses switching to decarbonized fuels.