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.






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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:












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.







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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:​






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