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Does reducing building energy consumption have the same effects on reducing CO₂ in the era of high renewable energy penetration? Our recent paper with current and former Ph.D. students, Yingli Lou, Yunyang Ye, Yizhi Yang and Jing Wang, finds that although reducing total building energy consumption can still reduce CO₂ emission, it is critical to decide when and where to reduce building energy consumption.

Building retrofits have great potential to reduce CO₂ emissions since buildings are responsible for 36% of emissions in the United States. As a part of a comprehensive research project funded by US National Science Foundation, the Science Foundation Ireland, and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland, our team has investigated the effect of building retrofit measures on emission reduction using hourly emission factors of electricity. Results suggest that due to the variability of CO₂ emission factors, the most energy efficient measure is not necessarily the most efficient emission measure.

This work has been published under the title of " The effect of building retrofit measures on CO₂ emissions reduction – A case study with U.S. medium office buildings" in the journal of Energy and Buildings. To get more insights about this paper please visit this link.

The first author of this paper, Yingli Lou, is a Ph.D. student in the SBS lab, where her research focuses on large-scale building energy simulation and carbon emissions from buildings. Congratulations to Yingli Lou on publishing this paper!