| Description |
As the scientific community continues to make predictions about the implications of a changing climate within our social and material infrastructures, the call for solutions that mitigate these implications is becoming more urgent than ever before. Responsible for a large portion of the energy demand in developed regions, buildings are central to the problem and the solution. In this work, a tool is developed for quantifying indirect emissions and water usage associated with power drawn from the electrical grid. The tool uses the WattTime API and databases published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy. It is developed as an open-access tool that provides hourly externality data for select locations within the United States. This kind of data can be hugely influential in understating the impact of building operations and the extent to which this extends beyond the immediate surroundings of a building. After a brief focus on the environmental issues that buildings can pose, the thesis moves into an example of how Model Predictive Control (MPC), a control methodology gaining popularity in building energy control, can be used to mitigate the burden that buildings can have on grid operations and the environment. Building energy modeling is the focal point of MPC algorithms, and for many reasons, is the deciding factor in the feasibility of MPC in real building systems. In particular, uncertainty in complex building models and in the data that are used to make them act as a barrier for wide-scale infiltration into the building sector. Here, an uncertainty analysis for a small office building is used to better understand the extent to which models can be simplified without compromising accuracy and how uncertainty in the most important building modeling parameters can impact the MPC optimization procedure. It is intended that this work is presented through the lens of an applied framework and that the tools and methods herein extend our opportunities for understanding and mitigating the environmental challenges that we are experiencing. |
