New engineering design means and methods are needed to enable and speed adoption of low carbon retrofit technologies. Efficient heating and cooling energy systems are widely available but underused due to lack of knowledge and thermal system interaction. Decarbonization requires adapting distribution designed for legacy thermal supply to electric and renewable thermal energy systems. The solution is Resource Efficient Electrification (REE). This novel approach emerges from the Empire Building Challenge after one year of collaboration between real estate partners, industry-leading engineering consultants and the NYSERDA team. REE is a design strategy which can help alleviate space constraints issues, provide peak thermal capacity, optimize operational efficiencies, utilize waste heat, and reduce the need for oversized electrified thermal energy systems creating retrofit cost compression. It is a framework of building decarbonization tailored to cold climate tall buildings but that can be applied across New York’s, wide array of building types, vintages and systems. This heuristic 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.
Resource Efficient Electrification focused on implementing enabling steps that will keep future optionality as technology and policy evolves. This framework allows the building owner or manager to take action now instead of waiting for better technology and potentially renewing a fossil-fueled powered energy system for another life cycle.
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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:
Commercial office buildings offer significant heat recovery and storing opportunities due to simultaneous heating and cooling daily profiles. As a result, offices can heat themselves much of the year with heat recovery and storage.
Multifamily buildings typical daily profiles show efficiency opportunities that can lower and flatten system peaks. This can be achieved by a variety of heat reduction, recovery and storing strategies.
The thermal energy network approach enables transaction of thermal energy to increase overall system efficiency and reduce wasted heat. The concept can be applied at the building level (with floor-by-floor heat exchange), to groups of buildings, to whole neighborhoods or cities. Below is an illustration of a whole-system, thermal network approach applied in an urban environment to supply clean heat in cold-climate tall buildings:
