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.
Overcoming the Barriers
Tall building Decarbonization requires a whole-systems approach to overcome barriers
Why Go Electric
Efficient heat pumps reduce CO2 in tall buildings. Electric resistance and inefficient heat pump operation may not today.
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.