Page 132 - Designing for Zero Carbon - Case Studies of All-Electric Buildings

DESIGNING FOR ZERO CARBON OBSERVATIONS
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Designing for Zero Carbon: Volume 1
Looking Ahead
• Battery storage and peak load shifting
With grid decarbonization will come serious issues of the public utility’s need to manage the impact of the variation in both the electric energy demand on the grid and the electric energy supply coming from wind and solar sources. (See the discussion of grid harmonization in the Introduction, page x.) This will lead to more buildings with energy storage systems to take advantage of time-of-day energy price structures if they operate significantly during the peak load periods in the evening hours.
An additional consideration may be resiliency, the ability to operate in short-term periods of service interruption from the public utility grid. Recent extreme natural events in several parts of the country that disrupted ordinary service to large populated areas have brought the planning issue forward, again suggesting some form of short-term energy storage sys- tem as an essential part of the design.
None of the case study projects in this book considered this feature as a solution for a re- cently evolving design issue, but change is expected in the future.
• Assessing embodied carbon impacts
Another newly emerging aspect of zero-carbon building design is embodied carbon. As the electric grid is decarbonized within the next 25 years, this will remain a source of building carbon emissions due to the construction of buildings, especially new buildings—thus the need to address this issue thoroughly in the design phases of future projects.
Interestingly, one of the case studies seriously addressed this important issue—Redford Conservancy at Pitzer College, page 70. See pages 86-87 for a summary discussion of the basic methodology when doing an embodied carbon assessment. See also such publica- tions as shown on the opposite page, which provide complete overview and methodology for embodied carbon analysis of building projects.
As noted in the case study, the decision to renovate rather than build a new building was made for “conservancy” reasons, but the embodied carbon assessment was done in detail as a proof-of-concept. The result justified the decision by a wide margin.
Representatives of other case study projects in this book observed that an embodied carbon assessment would have been carried out if the project had been initiated earlier.
It is expected that such an exercise will be routinely carried out in the decarbonized building future. The embodied carbon assessment will no doubt yield results that are very particular to site, building program and cost, and will be one of several design considerations during the planning phases. But reliable analytical tools are emerging and are being added to the standard design toolkit of architects and engineers.