Abstract
High-performance districts and communities offer opportunities for reducing energy use, emissions, and costs, and can be instrumental in helping cities achieve their climate goals. The design of such communities requires identification of opportunities early on and their re-evaluation throughout the planning process. There is a need for energy modeling tools that connect 3D Computer-Aided Design (CAD) platforms to simulation engines, enabling detailed energy analysis of districts within the workflows and tools used by practitioners. This paper introduces the Dragonfly and URBANoptTM combined toolset that supports the creation of urban models from a range of geometry formats typically used by designers and planners, and provides an integrated pathway to simulate district-scale energy systems. The toolset is piloted by a global architecture and master planning firm to evaluate several key urban-scale technical questions for the design of a district in Chicago. The findings indicate that, while energy savings can be achieved through traditional architectural studies and enhancements to individual building efficiency, the modeling toolset helps identify additional savings and insights that can be achieved when considering district-scale energy systems. Finally, this study demonstrates how the Dragonfly/URBANopt toolset can integrate with master planning workflows, thereby enabling an iterative performance-based design process.
Highlights
IntroductionCities are at the nexus of economic growth and development, and are facing rapid urbanization
While climate commitments are being made at larger scales across cities and countries, it is at smaller scales where many specific projects, especially those that reduce emissions in the buildings sector, will occur
We demonstrate the integration of the URBANopt SDK with Ladybug Tools through the Dragonfly plugin, described further which provides an interface for the 3D Grasshopper ComputerAided Design (CAD) platform
Summary
Cities are at the nexus of economic growth and development, and are facing rapid urbanization. More than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas and this statistic is projected to increase to 68% by 2050—representing an additional 2.5 billion people between 2018 and 2050 [1]. Cities consume approximately two-thirds of the world’s energy, and account for 70% of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions [2]. As countries across the world pledge to limit global warming to a 1.5 °C increase in global mean temperature as part of the Paris Climate Agreement, many cities are recognizing this challenge and leading the transition to a clean-energy future by adopting policies to reduce GHG emissions. 400 cities have released strategies with net-zero energy goals and more than 200 cities have developed policies and legislation incorporating net-zero energy targets as part of the Race to
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