VG Director of Energy & Carbon Featured on USGBC-CA Blog: Designing for Peak Demand Reduction in a Carbon-Free Future
Verdical Group’s Director of Energy & Carbon Sara Motamedi recently wrote a blog post about her upcoming Net Zero Conference session for USGBC California (USGBC-CA)’s blog. The panel and post discuss how as buildings become increasingly electrified, reducing annual energy consumption alone is no longer enough.
As building professionals, we have traditionally focused on designing buildings to reduce total energy consumption. Peak demand, however, introduces a different perspective. Batteries can discharge during peak periods, solar PV can reduce daytime electricity demand, and thermal storage—such as chilled-water, ice, or hot-water storage—can shift heating and cooling production to a different time. Many effective peak-demand reduction strategies also begin with rethinking some of the fundamentals of architectural and MEP design.
System sizing will become increasingly important as our building stock is electrified, but the design process incentivizes conservatism at multiple stages, which can lead to oversized systems. For example, heating calculations usually exclude certain internal heat gains to establish a conservative design condition. Additional safety margins may then be applied to the resulting load. Each assumption may be reasonable on its own, but when multiple compounding conservative assumptions are combined, the result can be substantial equipment oversizing. Oversizing does not only affect the HVAC equipment itself. Larger heating and cooling systems can require larger fans, pumps, electrical feeders, transformers, and other supporting infrastructure. Equipment that is significantly oversized may also operate at low part-load conditions for much of its life, which can affect efficiency, controls, and comfort.
Read the full blog post here, and join her and colleagues Kristin Hernandez and Hani Hadadzadegan at the Net Zero Conference on October 8 to attend the panel!
