Resource Efficient Electrification (REE)
The Resource Efficient Electrification (REE) method of building decarbonization incorporates strategic capital planning, an integrated design process, and an incremental, network-oriented approach to deliver building heating, cooling, and ventilation which:
- requires limited or no combustion,
- enables carbon neutrality,
- is highly efficient at low design temperatures and during extreme weather,
- is highly resilient, demand conscious, and energy grid-interactive,
- reduces thermal waste by capturing as many on-site or nearby thermal flows as possible, and
- incorporates realistic and flexible implementation strategies by optimizing and scheduling low carbon retrofits phase-in.
Decarbonization Roadmap
The figure below illustrates a conceptual framework for accomplishing these objectives and overcoming the barriers described in a previous pages. Specific measures and sequencing will be highly bespoke for a given building, but engineers and their owner clients can use this bucketed framework to place actionable projects in context of an overarching decarbonization roadmap:
Actions
Review
- Disaggregate time-of-use profiles to identify heat waste and recovery opportunities and to right-size equipment.
Reduce
- Repair, upgrade and refresh envelopes.
- Optimize controls.
Reconfigure
- Eliminate or reduce inefficient steam and forced air distribution.
- Create thermal networks and enable heat recovery.
- Lower supply temperatures to ranges of optimal heat pump performance. • Segregate and cascade supply temperatures based on end-use.
Recover
- Simultaneous heating & cooling in different zones of building • Eliminate “free cooling” economizer modes
- Exhaust heat recovery; absorbent air cleaning
- Building wastewater heat recovery
- Municipal wastewater heat recovery
- Steam condensate
- Refrigeration heat rejection.
- Other opportunistic heat recovery and heat networking.
Store
- Store rejected heat from daytime cooling, for overnight heating.
- Store generated heat— centrally, distributed, or in the building’s thermal inertia.
- Deploy advanced urban geothermal and other district thermal networking solutions.