Buildings
Buildings account for a significant percentage of total energy use world-wide (about 24% in 2023). Building energy modeling provides an opportunity to study the impact of different energy savings measures to determine the best path forward when designing a new building or retrofitting an existing building.
Scaling Up Building Simulation to National Scale
Most building simulation is performed for individual buildings or at an urban scale. This project’s goal was to scale up to national scale. EnergyPlus itself is single-threaded and would not parallelize well due to the complexities of interactions between equipment and space. To solve this issue, each node receives a list of building models which are assigned to individual cores.
- Scaled up an existing workflow to switch from pure EnergyPlus to a more flexible setup which used OpenStudio to generate building models prior to running them with EnergyPlus (C++, MPI). This allowed is to initiate large-scale simulations by providing a simple CSV with relevant parameters without having generate and transfer all building models.
- With the OpenStudio connection, I was able to update the workflow to permit the use of custom weather files. This facilitated the use of weather files which accurately presented the climate zones in which each building model was located.
- Generated models and simulated building energy for nearly all buildings in the United States (125 million buildings in v1, 140 million buildings in v2) on supercomputer Theta.
- Set up a data workflow to transfer model outputs back to internal infrastructure (80TB of data).
- Published Model America dataset which consists of 122.9 million building models.
Visualizing Building Simulation Outputs
For this project, the team had run building models for all buildings in the Electrical Powerboard of Chattanooga (EPB) service area. The simulations included a baseline case and 10 different building retrofit options. My task was to integrate the model outputs in an interactive web tool.
- Augmented Cesium-based Virtual EPB web tool to include a comparison of energy, demand, and cost savings for aten different building retrofit options (e.g., improving insulation or upgrading water heaters) for all buildings in the EPB service area.
- Improved the visualization itself via updated selection of colormaps, less distracting base map, and the addition of a selection tool to choose which variable is visualized.
