BUILDING AS P OWER P LANT—BAPP

Abstract

The Building as Power Plant (BAPP) initiative seeks to integrateadvanced energy-effective building technologies (ascending strategies)with innovative distributed energy generation systems (cascading strat-egies), such that most or all of the building’s energy needs for heating,cooling, ventilating, and lighting are met on-site, under the premise offulfilling all requirements concerning user comfort and control (visual,thermal, acoustic, spatial, and air quality). This will be pursued by inte-grating a “passive approach” with the use of renewable energies. Inaddition, the project will achieve unprecedented levels of organizationalflexibility and technological adaptability. The project has progressedthough preliminary architectural design and engineering and 5 work-shops (Ascending Energy Strategies, Floor-by-Floor Infrastructures, Inte-rior Systems, HVAC Systems, and Cascading Energy Strategies). BAPP isdesigned as a 6-story building, located in Pittsburgh (a cold climate witha moderate solar potential), with a total area of about 6000 m 2 whichhouses classrooms, studios, laboratories, and administrative offices. Atpresent, the combined cooling, heating, and power generation optionthat is being considered for the demonstration building is a SiemensWestinghouse 250-kW solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). In this article, we willreport a number of integrated solution scenarios and their energy perfor-mance.