Lead Performer: National Renewable Energy Laboratory – Golden, CO
October 4, 2017
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Radiant Labs uses NREL’s ResStock to create a population of OpenStudio energy models that represent a housing stock of interest. Credit: Radiant Labs.
Lead Performer: National Renewable Energy Laboratory – Golden, CO
Partner: Radiant Labs – Boulder, CO
DOE Total Funding: $200,000
Cost Share: $40,000
Project Term: April 2017 - April 2018
Funding Type: Small Business Voucher (SBV) Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) Round 3
Related Projects: EnergyPlus, OpenStudio, ResStock
Project Objective
U.S. multifamily buildings house 35 million households, consuming 4 quads of source energy and spending $48 billion on utility bills every year. Almost all of these households live in urban areas, where cities are taking the lead on setting aggressive energy goals. However, many cities currently do not have the data and tools necessary to identify and target opportunities to save energy in their building stock.
Boulder, Colorado, startup Radiant Labs works with cities across the country to perform energy modeling and data analysis on a city’s housing stock in order to better understand the possibilities for large-scale retrofits and targeted marketing. Radiant Labs currently uses the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) ResStock platform to perform this analysis on residential building stocks. ResStock is an open-source software package that uses sampling over building asset characteristic distributions to create robust sets of EnergyPlus/OpenStudio energy models for stock-level building energy analysis. OpenStudio Measures can then be applied to the model population to estimate cost-effectiveness, penetration, and energy savings for different energy conservation measures (ECMs).
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will work with Radiant Labs to expand the capabilities of ResStock to multifamily buildings. NREL will extend ResStock to create models of multifamily buildings in different configurations. NREL will also develop OpenStudio Measures to model ECMs that are appropriate for multifamily buildings. Working with Radiant Labs and the City of Boulder, NREL will develop a database of multifamily housing stock characteristics. This database will form the basis of the characteristic distribution tables that drive ResStock.
In a second task, NREL will create tighter integration between ResStock and OpenStudio Server, allowing Radiant Labs—and other future users—to conduct large-scale ResStock-based analyses on their own.
This project will create an open-source version of ResStock, one that is extended to cover multifamily buildings. The tool will help Boulder and other cities assess energy and cost savings goals and opportunities in their residential and multifamily building stocks. This work also enables national-scale analysis of energy efficiency potential in multifamily buildings, which is of strong interest to a variety of stakeholders.
Contacts
DOE Technology Manager: Amir Roth
Lead Performer: Eric Wilson, NREL
Related Publications
E. Wilson, C. Christensen, S. Horowitz, J. Robertson, and J. Maquire, “Electric End-Use Energy Efficiency Potential in the U.S. Single-Family Housing Stock”, National Renewable Energy Laboratory Technical Report NREL/TP-5500-65667, Jan. 2017