Rapid Energy Modeling Workflow Demonstration Project

Department of Defense DoD energy success is measured against mandated goals for energy reduction and sustainable facility management. In order to make consistent and well-informed decisions across its entire portfolio of buildings, DoD has a critical need for a consistent, scalable approach to evaluating energy consumption of existing facilities, to compare tradeoffs between energy conservation measures, and to identify facilities that are in greatest need of improvement. In the last several years, it has become increasingly evident that existing methods of simulating and estimating energy use in buildings require highly trained engineers to spend significant time constructing energy analysis simulations. Shortcomings of past approaches included laborintensive data inputs, the need for subject matter experts to operate the modeling systems, and the inability to model the DoD building inventory in a timely or cost effective way. Autodesk began looking at ways to combine various data collection methods, best practices and software tools to address this problem, and the idea of Rapid Energy Modeling REM was conceived. Overall, the goal of the demonstration was to evaluate REM workflows and performance by comparing simulated to actual building energy consumption and investigate the scalability of REM workflows for the DoD. This project demonstrated that the REM workflow quickly captures and utilizes information on operations, geometry, orientation, weather, and materials, generating Three-Dimensional 3D Building Information Models BIM guided by satellite views of building footprints and simulating energy use patterns. In addition, the project demonstrated the application of simulated Energy Conservation Measures ECM on a subset population of buildings to understand effective ways to reduce their energy consumption.