Residential and commercial buildings consume nearly three-quarters of U.S. electricity — during peak hours, that share reaches 80 percent. Simulating that energy use on a broad scale can help identify ways to reduce it, cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

In a recent study, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) assessed energy use across more than 178,000 buildings using supercomputing power at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory. The effort is part of a larger goal to model all of the nation's 129 million buildings. If you were to tally up the energy bills from all of those buildings, the annual total would be around $403 billion.

The research team developed the Automatic Building Energy Modeling (AutoBEM) software, which is used to detect buildings, generate models and simulate building energy use for very large areas. Creating an energy picture of a large network of buildings can illuminate areas of opportunity for planning the most effective energy-saving measures.

For the study, scientists partnered with a municipal utility to create a "digital twin" of 178,337 buildings in Chattanooga, Tennessee. To do this, they integrated the utility's information on energy use for every building down to 15-minute intervals with satellite images, tax assessments and other data sources. Then they projected the effects of eight energy conservation measures on energy use, demand, cost and emissions. To run the simulations, the team used the Theta supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

The AutoBEM simulation of Chattanooga buildings found that 99 percent of them saw energy savings for the set of energy efficiency technologies evaluated. Increasing the efficiency of the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system by 7.5 percent saved $28,500 in annual energy costs averaged across 177,307 buildings, for example. Measures such as improved HVAC efficiency, space sealing, insulation or lighting each could have the potential to offset 500 to 3,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per building, the researchers concluded. Their paper was published in the journal Energies.

"What we do in buildings will have a long-lasting impact," said Joshua Ryan New, a computer scientist at ORNL and lead study author. "Creating a more sustainable and resilient building stock will have an impact that I might not see in my lifetime, but my grandchildren's grandchildren will be thankful we got that right."

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