Overview

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For the past half century, there has been an emphasis on reducing energy consumption in buildings through improvements in equipment and overall building performance, regardless of energy source. While climate sensitive and energy efficient building design remain the first steps, the emphasis has recently shifted to prioritize the elimination of fossil fuels in buildings by favoring renewably-generated electrical sources to address mounting concerns about climate change. In this course, you will explore of emerging trends in building energy system design to address electrification and decarbonization. You will focus on electrically driven vapor compression and heat pump technologies to address heating and cooling needs in building and explore opportunities to integrate buildings into electric grid operations.

Syllabus

Emerging Trends in Building Energy Systems

In this module, you will explore a selection of the growing opportunities for electrifying and decarbonizing buildings and the implications for building energy system design. You will learn the principles of grid flexibility and the opportunities to address housing affordability through adaptive reuse of commercial buildings and industrialized construction. You will also learn how to evaluate these opportunities during the conceptual design phase.

Low Energy Technologies

Before diving into electrification, it is imperative to exploit energy efficiency potential. In this module, you will analyze the performance of various low energy technology options, including heat and energy recovery, direct and indirect evaporative systems, airside and waterside economizers, and a variety of passive cooling strategies.

Heat Pump Technologies

Heat pumps are widely regarded as the key to electrification of building energy systems. In this module, you will understand and apply heat pump technology for both residential and commercial appllications, including ground source systems, and learn about successful projects to convert fossil fuel heating to heat pumps in existing buildings.

Building-to-Grid Integration

It is increasingly recognized that buildings can play an active role in the transition to a low carbon economy. In this module, you will learn how buildings can be active participants in the electric grid. The opportunities include the use of thermal energy storage, smart building controls, and optimal scheduling in response to economic and carbon emission signals from the grid in both individual buildings and building portfolios.

Comprehensive Design Example

The design of building energy systems is best learned by doing. In this module, we will develop a building energy system design for a building, drawing on material our previous course on Engineering Foundation for Building Energy Systems and Design of HVAC Distribution and Delivery Systems. The example building is being converted from an office building to a mixed use retail, office, and multifamily residential building. We will focus on the residential portion, designing a DOAS air distribution system to deliver ventilation and a pair of hot and cold water distribution systems to deliver heating and cooling through fan coil units in each apartment. We will select the fans, pumps, and coils to meet system requirements. We will also discuss the design considerations for primary system equipment to electrify and decarbonize the energy systems.

Final Assessment

This final exam comprehensively tests your understanding of all five modules of this course through a set of conceptual and quantitative questions. Some of the conceptual questions will involve simple arithmetic calculations, while the quantitative questions will require some analysis of low-energy and heat pump equipment. Review the module analyses before you embark on the final exam.