BSEG Presents At SimBuild

Student Liam Hendricken attended the 5th Biennial SimBuild Conference in Madison, WI this year during August. Aimed at blending both industrial practice and research initiatives, SimBuild provided technical sessions and workshops on emerging methods for simulation modeling in the building sector. While at the conference Liam presented work from his paper (co-authored by Dr. Jin Wen and Dr. Patrick Gurian of Drexel University as well as Dr. Kevin Otto of Robust Systems and Strategy, and William Sisson of United Technologies Research Centre), entitled “Capital Costs and Energy Savings Achieved by Energy Conservation Measures for Office Buildings in the Greater Philadelphia Region.” The abstract can be read below:

Building stakeholders often need to evaluate energy conservation measure (ECM) retrofit packages to reduce the cost of ownership and energy consumption. The considered alternatives are often ad-hoc and limited to familiar measures. To develop a more systematic evaluation of retrofit options, we study the impact of a wide set of ECMs in combinations as retrofit packages, and assess which combinations offer the most energy conservation for a given investment. We utilize EnergyPlus to evaluate the effectiveness of ECM packages in reducing energy use intensity, and use RSMeans to evaluate the costs of each package. We consider medium office buildings in the Greater Philadelphia region, because this sector offers high potential to reduce building energy consumption in the region. For any level of energy consumption reduction, we find there are several alternative packages of ECMs with varying costs. We identify the least cost alternatives for all levels of energy consumption reduction, and compare these against previous recommendations. This effort is part of an ongoing effort of the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster (GPIC) HUB to create such analyses for common building types in the region.