Collaborators: PNNL, USGBC, Ember Strategies and NYSERDA
My Role: Technical Implementation Lead (Building Science) at PNNL
About the project: USGBC LEEDv5 O+M was coming up with new credits in the Energy and Atmosphere category that required a building owner to start planning for decarbonizing their buildings. It required an ASHRAE level energy audit followed by short-term and long-term decarbonization plans and near-term capital assessment for retrofit implementation.
The goal for PNNL was to provide technical feedback on the methodology that was being developed by other collaborators in a spreadsheet and implement the same in DOE/PNNL tool called Audit Template.
Process and Methodology
The first major step was to understand the requirements and manage the challenge of a moving goal post since the methodology was continuously developing which could easily result in duplicative work for the software engineers. I divided the project into 4 major tasks.
Task breakdown:
- Review the technical requirements and provide feedback.
- Understand and implement the future Cambium emission factors (which were finalized initially before moving toward a linear interpolation using eGRID factors).
- Implement the specific customization to ASHRAE energy audit level 2 requirements based on USGBC requirements.
- Design and Implement the measure package comparison for short and long-term decarbonization plans, emissions trajectory accounting for grid cleaning, and 5-year capital plan for retrofit measures.
Task #1
I reviewed the extensive technical methodology and calculations, converted it in an easy-to understand flowchart to have a productive discussion with DOE and USGBC. This was important to have a common alignment on the methodology and to ensure the methodology was useful for other upcoming state policy requirements for decarbonization.
Task #2
I studied different Cambium scenarios and created a design documentation for the software development team to extract the required cambium emission factors and apply it to required sections of the tool. This task required a review of the entire platform, dividing reported carbon emissions into Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions and ensuring the emissions were applied to the correct sections of the tool (and energy audit results) with correct calculations. Additionally, I provided technical QA/QC to ensure the results were being correctly calculated and units were appropriately converted.
Task #3
USGBC did not want to go with a full ASHRAE Level 2 energy audit given the effort and cost it requires to be conducted. I (along with the PM) worked with their team to specify the requirements that were required vs nice to have vs not required for the LEED v5 credit and implemented those fields/calculations accordingly.
Task #4
I worked with other collaborators to implement various visualizations and line and bar graphs in Audit Template to show different Energy Conservation Measure (ECM) package comparisons, carbon emission trajectories for the next 20 years taking into account grid cleaning (using Cambium emission factors) and 5-year capital plan (cost) for each measure identified to be implemented in the next 5-years.
Jayati Chhabra 