Adams, Mark — Page 3

DOE OSTI2018

EnergyPlus Interior Radiant Heat Exchange Runtime Performance Improvements

EnergyPlus is the flagship whole-building energy simulation program developed by the US Department of Energy. This paper describes the various approaches to improve the performance of the interior radiant heat exchange algorithm. Vectorization, optimized Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library, multithreading, and Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) computation are all investigated. The approach with the best performance, while maintaining drop-in compatibility with existing EnergyPlus code, is the optimized BLAS library. However, GPU computing has the potential to reduce simulation time by orders of magnitude with major refactoring to EnergyPlus.

Adams, Mark↗

DOE OSTI2018

Reducing Building Energy Modeling Workloads Through Automated Calibration.

Abstract not provided.

Villa, Daniel↗

DOE OSTI2018

Automatic Building Energy Model Creation (AutoBEM) for Urban-Scale Energy Modeling and Assessment of Value Propositions for Electric Utilities

Residential and commercial buildings in the United States consume 73% of all electricity generated. Demand charges (i.e. “peak usage”) can account for 30-70% of a utility bill and continue to grow even as energy prices are decreasing, due largely in part to adoption of intermittent renewables and less efficient, more costly generation assets which must be brought online during peak demand. In order to quantitatively assess business value and either enhance existing or propose new programs for utilities, the ability to detect, generate, and simulate a building energy model has been applied to a 1,385 km2 utility district involving over 160,000 buildings in a smart grid backed by a fiber optic network. The organization operating the electrical distribution and fiber optic networks has prioritized and guided the creation of a virtual utility in order to assess a prioritized list of potential revenue streams and determine the most cost-effective programs for their organization and their rate-payers. We provide an overview of the technical capabilities developed for generally-applicable urban-scale building energy modeling to any geographical area and the utility-defined use cases being assessed.

New, Joshua↗