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At least 559 records · Page 31

Understanding Commercial Building Energy Use in the Tulsa to Wichita Falls I-44 Corridor: Building Stock Segmentation for Retrofit Planning

This report is part of the second phase of a publication series focusing on approximately 100 different local geographies, or "clusters." Each report provides characteristic features and energy data for commercial buildings in a specific area to help policy makers at the city, county, and state level better understand building energy use and emissions. This report breaks down the energy consumption and emissions of the building stock in the counties shown in Figure 2 by building type, building size, end use, energy consumption, emissions, and segment.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Understanding Commercial Building Energy Use in the Central Gulf Coast Area: Building Stock Segmentation for Retrofit Planning

This report is part of the second phase of a publication series focusing on approximately 100 different local geographies, or "clusters." Each report provides characteristic features and energy data for commercial buildings in a specific area to help policy makers at the city, county, and state level better understand building energy use and emissions. This report breaks down the energy consumption and emissions of the building stock in the counties shown in Figure 2 by building type, building size, end use, energy consumption, emissions, and segment.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Understanding Commercial Building Energy Use in the Greater Dallas-Fort Worth Area: Building Stock Segmentation for Retrofit Planning

This report is part of the second phase of a publication series focusing on approximately 100 different local geographies, or "clusters." Each report provides characteristic features and energy data for commercial buildings in a specific area to help policy makers at the city, county, and state level better understand building energy use and emissions. This report breaks down the energy consumption and emissions of the building stock in the counties shown in Figure 2 by building type, building size, end use, energy consumption, emissions, and segment.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Understanding Commercial Building Energy Use in the Huntsville-Florence Area: Building Stock Segmentation for Retrofit Planning

This report is part of the second phase of a publication series focusing on approximately 100 different local geographies, or "clusters." Each report provides characteristic features and energy data for commercial buildings in a specific area to help policy makers at the city, county, and state level better understand building energy use and emissions. This report breaks down the energy consumption and emissions of the building stock in the counties shown in Figure 2 by building type, building size, end use, energy consumption, emissions, and segment.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Understanding Commercial Building Energy Use in the Duluth-Grand Forks-Fargo Area: Building Stock Segmentation for Retrofit Planning

This report is part of the second phase of a publication series focusing on approximately 100 different local geographies, or "clusters." Each report provides characteristic features and energy data for commercial buildings in a specific area to help policy makers at the city, county, and state level better understand building energy use and emissions. This report breaks down the energy consumption and emissions of the building stock in the counties shown in Figure 2 by building type, building size, end use, energy consumption, emissions, and segment.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Understanding Commercial Building Energy Use in the Omaha-Lincoln Area: Building Stock Segmentation for Retrofit Planning

This report is part of the second phase of a publication series focusing on approximately 100 different local geographies, or "clusters." Each report provides characteristic features and energy data for commercial buildings in a specific area to help policy makers at the city, county, and state level better understand building energy use and emissions. This report breaks down the energy consumption and emissions of the building stock in the counties shown in Figure 2 by building type, building size, end use, energy consumption, emissions, and segment.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Energy Options Analysis Project (Final Report)

This Bear River Band of Rohnerville Rancheria (BRB) Energy Options Analysis Project provides a rigorous and comprehensive near-term renewable energy implementation plan that aligns with the BRB’s long term strategic vision of “zero net annual utility energy consumption.” Final recommendations were arrived at by following four key project phases:A gas and electricity load assessment was conducted for all existing buildings using historic consumption data, and projected loads of new or anticipated buildings using building designs. A renewable energy resource assessment was conducted that estimated the gross generation potential of solar and wind, constrained to areas that could potentially be developed. Other renewable generation technologies were not considered feasible to meet the loads of the BRB. Demand-side efficiency and fuel switching opportunities were identified that can reduce electrical and gas consumption. These opportunities were not integrated into the load assessment in order to provide a conservative implementation plan, but are recommended to be pursued in order to cost-optimize projects during a feasibility assessment. A strategic vision advisory committee was organized and consulted when iterating on the viability of possible projects. These project phases resulted in finalizing the following three solar PV projects for the near term, which also lay the foundation for a future community-scale or multiple-facility microgrid for added resiliency. Additional solar PV on the hillside south of the Tish-Non Community Center. Solar plus battery storage microgrid at the Pump & Play fuel station. Solar PV at the Casino.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Meteorological data from the Billy Bar site at the East River, Colorado

This dataset includes Quality Assessed and Quality Controlled (QA/QC) meteorological data from the Billy Bar field site in the East River Watershed, Colorado in order to inform watershed hydrobiogeochemical processes. The data includes 1-hour aligned time series of Solar Radiation, Wind Speed, Wind Direction, Air Temperature, Relative Humidity, Barometric Pressure, and Precipitation. For each parameter, the QA flags are given: 1 is for extreme (potential abnormal values), and 0 is for values in the expected range. The Rmarkdown document is a stand-alone file/notebook that preserves the text, code, and code results, as well as formatting contained in the original R script. The Data profiling report is a summary and graphical presentation of the data exploration process for data analysis and model building, so that users could focus on understanding data and extracting insights. The report provides a summary of each variable and does data profiling.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Some Continuum Aspects of Data Assimilation

A long-sought goal in data assimilation is to build more fully the time dimension into the data assimilation process. Truly four-dimensional data assimilation requires evolving second-moment information, namely the estimation error covariance, along with the state estimate itself. The continuum evolution equations for the estimation error covariance constitute a system of partial differential equations in six space dimensions, forced by a model error covariance and by the observations themselves. The high dimensionality of this system poses a difficult computational problem. Numerous methods have been proposed for approximate, discrete solution of this system of equations. Four-dimensional variational schemes solve these equations indirectly, while schemes based on Kalman filtering solve the equations more directly, usually on a small subspace of the full six-dimensional space. In both cases, most proposed solution methods are not derived from the continuum covariance evolution equations themselves. Instead, most methods simply inherit the discretization used for evolving the state estimate, either in the form of a discrete tangent linear model or, in the case of ensemble schemes, in the form of a fully nonlinear discrete model. In this lecture we show that solutions of the continuum covariance evolution equations possess simple properties that are not readily satisfied upon discretization of the equations. we give numerical examples illustrating that "inherited" discretizations sometimes fail to produce meaningfully accurate solutions. Finally, we suggest alternative discretization methods that may yield more faithful approximate solutions of the continuum problem.

Cohn, Stephen E.↗

Building a Quality Controlled Database of Meteorological Data from NASA Kennedy Space Center and the United States Air Force's Eastern Range

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Natural Environments Branch (EV44) has provided atmospheric databases and analysis in support of space vehicle design and day-of-launch operations for NASA and commercial launch vehicle programs launching from the NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC), co-located on the United States Air Force's Eastern Range (ER) at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The ER complex is one of the most heavily instrumented sites in the United States with over 31 towers measuring various atmospheric parameters on a continuous basis. An inherent challenge with large sets of data consists of ensuring erroneous data is removed from databases, and thus excluded from launch vehicle design analyses. EV44 has put forth great effort in developing quality control (QC) procedures for individual meteorological instruments, however no standard QC procedures for all databases currently exists resulting in QC databases that have inconsistencies in variables, methodologies, and periods of record. The goal of this activity is to use the previous efforts by EV44 to develop a standardized set of QC procedures from which to build meteorological databases from KSC and the ER, while maintaining open communication with end users from the launch community to develop ways to improve, adapt and grow the QC database. Details of the QC procedures will be described. As the rate of launches increases with additional launch vehicle programs, it is becoming more important that weather databases are continually updated and checked for data quality before use in launch vehicle design and certification analyses.

Brenton, James C.↗

New U.S. Data Tools are Playing a Crucial Role in Decarbonizing Buildings at Speed, Scale, and Low Cost

Preparing buildings for retrofits traditionally requires expensive on-site audits or time- intensive simulation models. As a result, the majority of buildings fail to pursue cost-saving retrofits. To address these barriers, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has introduced the Building Efficiency Targeting Tool for Energy Retrofits (BETTER)—a new, free, on-line tool that utilizes a data-driven analytical engine and user-friendly web interface to automatically analyze a building’s monthly energy usage in response to weather conditions. The tool benchmarks a building’s electric and fossil energy usage against peers; estimates energy, cost, and emissions reductions at the building and portfolio levels; recommends energy efficiency measures; and prioritizes buildings for net-zero energy retrofits. Thanks to interoperability with the DOE’s Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) platform, BETTER is supporting U.S. jurisdictions to prepare buildings for retrofit at speed, scale, and low cost to comply with energy policies. This paper discusses the use of BETTER and SEED by one of the branches of the California state government to streamline a retrofit program across 455 public non-residential buildings to align with state goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It describes the organization’s challenge to reduce energy consumption across a geographically diverse, aging portfolio; explores how BETTER and SEED improved workflow efficiency; presents preliminary results, including avoiding audit costs of $3.28 million and developing the groundwork for retrofit projects estimated to prevent emission of 2,271 t CO2e annually; and provides guidance for other jurisdictions seeking similar results.

Li, han↗

surf3d: A 3-D finite-element program for the analysis of surface and corner cracks in solids subjected to mode-1 loadings

A computer program, surf3d, that uses the 3D finite-element method to calculate the stress-intensity factors for surface, corner, and embedded cracks in finite-thickness plates with and without circular holes, was developed. The cracks are assumed to be either elliptic or part eliptic in shape. The computer program uses eight-noded hexahedral elements to model the solid. The program uses a skyline storage and solver. The stress-intensity factors are evaluated using the force method, the crack-opening displacement method, and the 3-D virtual crack closure methods. In the manual the input to and the output of the surf3d program are described. This manual also demonstrates the use of the program and describes the calculation of the stress-intensity factors. Several examples with sample data files are included with the manual. To facilitate modeling of the user's crack configuration and loading, a companion program (a preprocessor program) that generates the data for the surf3d called gensurf was also developed. The gensurf program is a three dimensional mesh generator program that requires minimal input and that builds a complete data file for surf3d. The program surf3d is operational on Unix machines such as CRAY Y-MP, CRAY-2, and Convex C-220.

Raju, I. S.↗

Pilot Study for Determining HVAC Fault Prevalence from Fault Monitoring Data

HVAC faults in U.S. commercial buildings are estimated to waste 0.7 quads of energy annually and many companies have deployed software at scale for fault detection and diagnosis (FDD). Yet the lack of comprehensive published data on fault prevalence makes it difficult for researchers, software developers, and building operators to target the most important types of faults and accelerate the widespread deployment of this technology. A multi-lab effort is underway to quantify the prevalence of commercial building HVAC faults. This paper describes initial analysis conducted on over 2-years of FDD data from 12 campus buildings to inform the methodology and data collection strategy of the full study. The analysis found a large variability in fault prevalence across different buildings, pieces of equipment, and fault types, many duplicate fault alarms, and challenges in validating faults with secondary data sources such as manually entered work order data. This paper also discusses the requirements for a successful full study, which necessitates the acquisition of a large, diverse dataset, from buildings that vary in end-use, climate region, and installed FDD software platform, as well as robust validation data easily linked to the FDD data. It is especially important to perform this analysis on data from multiple FDD providers and building owners to ensure that the results are agnostic to the software methodology used and building-specific settings. Future work will present the results of the full study, which will contain data from several different partner organizations, spanning a large proportion of U.S. climate zones.

Newman, Sarah F.↗

A New Machine Learning Based Analysis for Improving Satellite Retrieved Atmospheric Composition Data: OMI SO2 as an Example

Despite recent progress, satellite retrievals of anthropogenic SO2 still suffer from relatively low signal-tonoise ratios. In this study, we demonstrate a new machine learning data analysis method to improve the quality of satellite SO2 products. In the absence of large ground-truth datasets for SO2, we start from SO2 slant column densities (SCDs) retrieved from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) using a data-driven, physically based algorithm and calculate the ratio between the SCD and the root mean square (rms) of the fitting residuals for each pixel. To build the training data, we select presumably clean pixels with small SCD / rms ratios (SRRs) and set their target SCDs to zero. For polluted pixels with relatively large SRRs, we set the target to the original retrieved SCDs. We then train neural networks (NNs) to reproduce the target SCDs using predictors including SRRs for individual pixels, solar zenith, viewing zenith and phase angles, scene reflectivity, and O3 column amounts, as well as the monthly mean SRRs. For data analysis, we employ two NNs: (1) one trained daily to produce analyzed SO2 SCDs for polluted pixels each day and (2) the other trained once every month to produce analyzed SCDs for less polluted pixels for the entire month. Test results for 2005 show that our method can significantly reduce noise and artifacts over background regions. Over polluted areas, the monthly mean NN-analyzed and original SCDs generally agree to within ±15 %, indicating that our method can retain SO2 signals in the original retrievals except for large volcanic eruptions. This is further confirmed by running both the NN-analyzed and original SCDs through a topdown emission algorithm to estimate the annual SO2 emissions for ∼ 500 anthropogenic sources, with the two datasets yielding similar results. We also explore two alternative approaches to the NN-based analysis method. In one, we employ a simple linear interpolation model to analyze the original SCD retrievals. In the other, we develop a PCA–NN algorithm that uses OMI measured radiances, transformed and dimension-reduced with a principal component analysis (PCA) technique, as inputs to NNs for SO2 SCD retrievals. While the linear model and the PCA–NN algorithm can reduce retrieval noise, they both underestimate SO2 over polluted areas. Overall, the results presented here demonstrate that our new data analysis method can significantly improve the quality of existing OMI SO2 retrievals. The method can potentially be adapted for other sensors and/or species and enhance the value of satellite data in air quality research and applications.

Can Li↗

Envelope-driven comfort risk in residential demand response

Residential demand response (DR) is a valuable resource for grid reliability, but remains challenging because the highly heterogeneous residential building stock leads to widely varying and hard-to-predict load and comfort responses during DR events. Although prior research has estimated the technical potential of DR-capable technologies for achieving energy demand savings, little is known about how they affect thermal comfort. In particular, it remains unclear how indoor thermal conditions due to DR depend on the thermal envelope characteristics of the housing stock. To address this gap, this study provides a systematic, location-specific assessment of indoor thermal performance during DR-events across the US housing stock using both typical DR weather data and detailed building metadata. We evaluate how envelope characteristics influence indoor temperatures during realistic simulated summer and winter DR events across 37 US locations, applying both temperature threshold and rate of temperature change criteria to estimate region-level probabilities of discomfort. Additionally, we show the impact of distinct weather patterns that intensify or abate thermal stress on comfort outcomes. Results show a near-universal overheating risk in summer DR events, where comfort outcomes are strongly influenced by rapid risk of comfort violations. In contrast, overall winter DR discomfort risk is lower, risk escalation is more gradual and shows greater sensitivity to event duration. These findings offer a data-driven quantification of comfort risk across diverse climates and building envelopes, demonstrating the need for region-specific DR scheduling and discomfort mitigation strategies tailored to local weather patterns and the performance of existing residential buildings.

Demand response↗

Urban-scale Energy Modeling: Scaling Beyond Tax Assessor Data

In an attempt to attain building-specific characteristics for urban-scale building energy models, county-specific tax assessors’ data is often an initial data source. This data source can contain valuable information such as year built, area, height, HVAC type, and roof/wall descriptions.We will show examples of 2,000 fields from Hamilton County in Tennessee with examples of many fields which are not relevant to urban-scale building energy modeling, are incorrect compared to other data sources, and highlight some lessons learned working with such a data source.There are currently 3,142 counties in the United States, each with their own data format, field definitions, and data access policy. As urban-scale involves city-scale analysis potentially covering multiple counties and matures toward state- or nation-scale analysis, county-by-county approaches are not scalable. While there are efforts to unify these datasets, there is an increasing proliferation of data and algorithms that can cover wider areas and provide more accurate inputs for urban-scale models. This paper summarizes computer vision of imagery, cartographic layers, building type assessment, and model generation used to achieve scalable detection and analysis of buildings.

New, Joshua↗

Optimizing Alabama’s CO 2 Storage in Shelby County (Project OASIS), Task 5.0 Deliverable: Infrastructure Assessment Report

The “Optimizing Alabama’s CO 2 Storage in Shelby County: Project OASIS” CarbonSAFE Phase II Project seeks to build on regional data sets that demonstrate that the subsurface within Shelby County, Alabama has the potential to store commercial volumes of CO 2 safely, permanently, and economically. This work builds on the initiatives of the Southeast Regional Carbon Utilization and Storage Acceleration Partnership (SECARB-USA, DE-FE0031830) that identified nearly 500 million metric tonnes of CO 2 emitted on an annual basis that is not collocated with prospective storage geology (the Coastal Plain of the Southeastern U.S. in this context). This observation suggests costly investments in connective infrastructure (e.g., pipelines) or exploratory well drilling campaigns to identify CO 2 storage opportunities in under explored areas. While not traditionally thought of for saline storage, these studies suggest that storage prospects in the Valley and Ridge Province occur in relatively flat lying structural panels between thrust faults. For the Project OASIS region, available geologic studies related to hydrocarbon exploration suggest that Cambro-Ordovician carbonates and Cambrian clastic units offer multiple potential storage intervals, and that regional confining systems are present, such as the tectonically thickened Floyd-Parkwood Shale. The Project OASIS surface property is owned by a timber and land stewardship company, The Westervelt Company, Inc., who worked with the Project Team to select and prepare adequate sites for geologic assessment.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗

Optimizing Alabama’s CO 2 Storage in Shelby County (Project OASIS): Task 8 Deliverable 8.0 - Commercialization Plan

The “Optimizing Alabama’s CO 2 Storage in Shelby County: Project OASIS” CarbonSAFE Phase II Project seeks to build on regional data sets that demonstrate that the subsurface within Shelby County, Alabama has the potential to store commercial volumes of CO 2 safely, permanently, and economically. This work builds on the initiatives of the Southeast Regional Carbon Utilization and Storage Acceleration Partnership (SECARB-USA, DE-FE0031830) that identified nearly 500 million metric tonnes of CO 2 emitted on an annual basis from industrial facilities that are not collocated with prospective storage geology (i.e., the Coastal Plain of the Southeastern U.S. in this context). This observation suggests costly investments in connective infrastructure (e.g., pipelines) or exploratory well drilling campaigns are required to identify CO 2 storage opportunities in under-developed areas. While not traditionally thought of for saline storage, these studies suggest that storage prospects in the Valley and Ridge Province of the Appalachian Fold and Thrust Belt occur in relatively flat lying structural panels between thrust faults. For the Project OASIS region, available geologic studies related to hydrocarbon exploration suggest that Cambro-Ordovician carbonates and Cambrian clastic units offer multiple potential storage intervals, and that regional confining systems are present, such as the tectonically thickened Floyd-Parkwood Shale.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗