Greenhouse gases trap heat within our atmosphere, leading to an unnatural increase in temperature. Carbon dioxide and its equivalent emissions have been a large focus when considering sustainability in the civil engineering field, with a reduction of global warming potential being a top priority. According to a 2017 report by the World Green Building Council, the construction and usage of buildings account for 39 percent of human carbon emissions in the United States, almost one third of which are from the extraction, manufacturing, and transportation of materials. Substituting wood for high emission materials could greatly reduce carbon if harvested and disposed of in a controlled way. To investigate this important issue, San Francisco State University and University of South Carolina partnered with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, a world leader in designing high-rise buildings, through a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site program, to investigate and quantify the embodied carbons of various slab system designs using a high-rise residential complex in San Francisco as a case study. Three concept designs were considered: a concrete building with cementitious replacement, a concrete building without cementitious replacement, and a concrete building with cementitious replacement and nail-laminated timber wood inlays inserted into various areas of the superstructure slabs. The composite structural slab system has the potential to surpass the limitations of wood-framed structures yet incorporate the carbon sequestration that makes wood a more sustainable material. The results show that wood substitution could decrease overall emissions from the aforementioned designs and reduce the environmental footprint of the construction industry.
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This content will become publicly available on November 15, 2024
Quantifying the Decarbonization Potential of Flexible Load
The impact of human activity on the climate is a major global challenge that affects human well-being. Buildings are a major source of energy consumption and carbon emissions worldwide, especially in advanced economies such as the United States. As a result, making grids and buildings sustainable by reducing their carbon emissions is emerging as an important step toward societal decarbonization and improving overall human well-being. While prior work on demand response methods in power grids and buildings has targeted peak shaving and price arbitrage in response to price signals, it has not explicitly targeted carbon emission reductions.
In this paper, we analyze the flexibility of building loads to quantify the upper limit on their potential to reduce carbon emissions, assuming perfect knowledge of future demand and carbon intensity. Our analysis leverages real-world demand patterns from 1000+ buildings and carbon-intensity traces from multiple regions. It shows that by manipulating the demand patterns of electric vehicles, heating, ventilation, and cooling (HVAC) systems, and battery storage, we can reduce carbon emissions by 26.93% on average and by 54.90% at maximum. Our work advances the understanding of sustainable infrastructure by highlighting the potential for infrastructure design and interventions to significantly reduce carbon footprints, benefiting human well-being.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2105494
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10496898
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- BuildSys '23: Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 429 to 433
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Istanbul Turkey
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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