The solution to the misconceptions and technical barriers faced by decarbonization laid out in previous pages is the Resource Efficient Electrification (REE) framework. This novel approach comes out of the Empire Building Challenge after one year of collaboration between real estate companies, industry-leading engineering consultants and NYSERDA. REE is a novel approach of building decarbonization tailored to cold climate tall buildings, that 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.
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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:
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Offices can heat themselves much of the year with heat recovery and storage.
Multi-family can lower and flatten system peaks by a variety of reduce, recover and store strategies
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A whole-system, thermal network approach to clean heat in cold-climate tall buildings:
