Technical Support Document: Development of the Advanced Energy Design Guide for Grocery Stores--50% Energy Savings

This report provides recommendations that architects, designers, contractors, developers, owners, and lessees of grocery store buildings can use to achieve whole-building energy savings of at least 50% over ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2004

Technical Support Document: Development of the Advanced Energy Design Guide for Medium Box Retail -- 50% Energy Savings

This report provides recommendations that architects, designers, contractors, developers, owners, and lessees of medium box retail buildings can use to achieve whole-building energy savings of at least 50% over ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2004. The recommendations are given by climate zone and address building envelope, fenestration, lighting systems, HVAC systems, building automation and controls, outside air treatment, service water heating, plug loads, and photovoltaic systems. The report presents several paths to 50% savings, which correspond to different levels of integrated design. These are recommendations only, and are not part of a code or standard. The recommendations are not exhaustive, but we do try to emphasize the benefits of integrated building design, that is, a design approach that analyzes a building as a whole system, rather than as a disconnected collection of individually engineered subsystems

Occupying wide open spaces? Late Pleistocene hunter–gatherer activities in the Eastern Levant

With a specific focus on eastern Jordan, the Epipalaeolithic Foragers in Azraq Project explores changing hunter-gatherer strategies, behaviours and adaptations to this vast area throughout the Late Pleistocene. In particular, we examine how lifeways here (may have) differed from surrounding areas and what circumstances drew human and animal populations to the region. Integrating multiple material cultural and environmental datasets, we explore some of the strategies of these eastern Jordanian groups that resulted in changes in settlement, subsistence and interaction and, in some areas, the occupation of substantial aggregation sites. Five years of excavation at the aggregation site of Kharaneh IV suggest some very intriguing technological and social on-site activities, as well as adaptations to a dynamic landscape unlike that of today. Here we discuss particular aspects of the Kharaneh IV material record within the context of ongoing palaeoenvironmental reconstructions and place these findings in the wider spatial and temporal narratives of the Azraq Basin

Scripted Building Energy Modeling and Analysis

Building energy analysis is often time-intensive, error-prone, and non-reproducible. Entire energy analyses can be scripted end-to-end using the OpenStudio Ruby API. Common tasks within an analysis can be automated using OpenStudio Measures. Graphical user interfaces (GUI's) and component libraries reduce time, decrease errors, and improve repeatability in energy modeling

OpenStudio: An Open Source Integrated Analysis Platform; Preprint

High-performance buildings require an integrated design approach for all systems to work together optimally; systems integration needs to be incorporated in the earliest stages of design for efforts to be cost and energy-use effective. Building designers need a full-featured software framework to support rigorous, multidisciplinary building simulation. An open source framework - the OpenStudio Software Development Kit (SDK) - is being developed to address this need. In this paper, we discuss the needs that drive OpenStudio's system architecture and goals, provide a development status report (the SDK is currently in alpha release), and present a brief case study that illustrates its utility and flexibility

Flexible Framework for Building Energy Analysis: Preprint

In the building energy research and advanced practitioner communities, building models are perturbed across large parameter spaces to assess energy and cost performance in the face of programmatic and economic constraints. This paper describes the OpenStudio software framework for performing such analyses

Scripted Building Energy Modeling and Analysis: Preprint

Building energy modeling and analysis is currently a time-intensive, error-prone, and nonreproducible process. This paper describes the scripting platform of the OpenStudio tool suite (http://openstudio.nrel.gov) and demonstrates its use in several contexts. Two classes of scripts are described and demonstrated: measures and free-form scripts. Measures are small, single-purpose scripts that conform to a predefined interface. Because measures are fairly simple, they can be written or modified by inexperienced programmers

Commercial Building Design Pathways Using Optimization Analysis: Preprint

Whole-building simulation and analysis has demonstrated a significant energy savings potential in a wide variety of design projects. Commercial building design, however, traditionally integrates simulation and modeling analyses too late in the design process to make a substantial impact on energy use. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) commercial building group created an optimization platform called Opt-E-Plus that uses multivariate and multi-objective optimization theory to navigate a large parameter space and find economically valid, energy-saving solutions. The analysis results provide designers and engineers valuable information that influences the design. The pathways are not full 'construction ready' design alternatives; rather, they offer guidance about performance and cost criteria to reach a range of energy and economic goals. Having this knowledge early in the design phase helps designers establish project goals and direct the design pathway before they make important decisions. Opt-E-Plus has been deployed on several projects, including a retrofit mixed-use building, a new NREL office building, and several nationwide design guides. Each of these projects had different design criteria, goals, and audiences. In each case the analysis results provided pathways that helped inform the design process