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Dirks, James A.

Publications and source records attributed to Dirks, James A..

6 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2015

Investigating the Nexus of Climate, Energy, Water, and Land at Decision-Relevant Scales: The Platform for Regional Integrated Modeling and Analysis (PRIMA)

The Platform for Regional Integrated Modeling and Analysis (PRIMA) is an innovative modeling system developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to simulate interactions among natural and human systems at scales relevant to regional decision making. PRIMA brings together state-of-the-art models of regional climate, hydrology, agriculture, socioeconomics, and energy systems using a flexible coupling approach. The platform can be customized to inform a variety of complex questions and decisions, such as the integrated evaluation of mitigation and adaptation options across a range of sectors. Research into stakeholder decision support needs underpins the platform's application to regional issues, including uncertainty characterization. Ongoing numerical experiments are yielding new insights into the interactions among human and natural systems on regional scales with an initial focus on the energy-land-water nexus in the upper U.S. Midwest. This paper focuses on PRIMA’s functional capabilities and describes some lessons learned to date about integrated regional modeling.

integrated regional modeling↗
DOE OSTI2014

Nationwide Buildings Energy Research enabled through an integrated Data Intensive Scientific Workflow and Advanced Analysis Environment

Modern workflow systems enable scientists to run ensemble simulations at unprecedented scales and levels of complexity, allowing them to study system sizes previously impossible to achieve, due to the inherent resource requirements needed for the modeling work. However as a result of these new capabilities the science teams suddenly also face unprecedented data volumes that they are unable to analyze with their existing tools and methodologies in a timely fashion. In this paper we will describe the ongoing development work to create an integrated data intensive scientific workflow and analysis environment that offers researchers the ability to easily create and execute complex simulation studies and provides them with different scalable methods to analyze the resulting data volumes. The integration of simulation and analysis environments is hereby not only a question of ease of use, but supports fundamental functions in the correlated analysis of simulation input, execution details and derived results for multi-variant, complex studies. To this end the team extended and integrated the existing capabilities of the Velo data management and analysis infrastructure, the MeDICi data intensive workflow system and RHIPE the R for Hadoop version of the well-known statistics package, as well as developing a new visual analytics interface for the result exploitation by multi-domain users. The capabilities of the new environment are demonstrated on a use case that focusses on the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) building energy team, showing how they were able to take their previously local scale simulations to a nationwide level by utilizing data intensive computing techniques not only for their modeling work, but also for the subsequent analysis of their modeling results. As part of the PNNL research initiative PRIMA (Platform for Regional Integrated Modeling and Analysis) the team performed an initial 3 year study of building energy demands for the US Eastern Interconnect domain, which they are now planning to extend to predict the demand for the complete century. The initial study raised their data demands from a few GBs to 400GB for the 3year study and expected tens of TBs for the full century.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Modeling the effect of climate change on U.S. state-level buildings energy demands in an integrated assessment framework

As long-term socioeconomic transformation and energy service expansion show large spatial heterogeneity, advanced understanding of climate impact on building energy use at the sub-national level will offer useful insights into climate policy and regional energy system planning. In this study, we presented a detailed building energy model with a U.S. state-level representation, nested in the GCAM integrated assessment framework. We projected state-level building energy demand and its spatial pattern over the century, considering the impact of climate change based on the estimates of heating and cooling degree days derived from downscaled USGS CASCaDE temperature data. The result indicates that climate change has a large impact on heating and cooling building energy and fuel use at the state level, exhibiting large spatial heterogeneity across states (ranges from -10% to +10%). The sensitivity analysis reveals that the building energy demand is subject to multiple key factors, such as the magnitude of climate change, the choice of climate models, and the growth of population and GDP, and that their relative contributions vary greatly across the space. The scale impact in building energy use modeling highlights the importance of constructing a building energy model with the spatially-explicit representation of socioeconomics, energy system development, and climate change. These findings will help the climate-based policy decision and energy system, especially utility planning related to building sector at the U.S. state and regional level facing the potential climate change.

Building Energy Demand, Climate Change Impact, Sta↗
DOE OSTI2013

Streamlining and Refining FEDS Loads Models (Final Report)

The Facility Energy Decision System (FEDS) software is a powerful buildings energy analysis tool developed by Battelle at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory with support from numerous organizations including several within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). FEDS is used extensively throughout the federal sector to examine building energy efficiency potential and recommend energy saving retrofit projects. The focus of this CRADA was to update the foundation of the FEDS loads models, to improve the core functionality and calculation methods and position the building efficiency analysis software for continued growth. The broader intent was to increase FEDS utility and user satisfaction via improving modeling accuracy, facilitating development and making possible a wide range of new and desired capability enhancements. This report provides an summary of the various tasks performed under the CRADA.

Dahowski, Robert T.↗
DOE OSTI2010

Aggregate Building Simulator (ABS) Methodology Development, Application, and User Manual

As the relationship between the national building stock and various global energy issues becomes a greater concern, it has been deemed necessary to develop a system of predicting the energy consumption of large groups of buildings. Ideally this system is to take advantage of the most advanced energy simulation software available, be able to execute runs quickly, and provide concise and useful results at a level of detail that meets the users needs without inundating them with data. The resulting methodology that was developed allows the user to quickly develop and execute energy simulations of many buildings simultaneously, taking advantage of parallel processing to greatly reduce total simulation times. The result of these simulations can then be rapidly condensed and presented in a useful and intuitive manner.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗