Given the dominating impact of the built environment on global carbon emissions, reducing operational energy use in buildings has long been considered a key strategy towards more sustainable urban development. In contrast, building energy use related to material production, construction, and demolition has been considered to be significantly less important. However, given the proliferation of l...

The operation of so-called Zero Emission Buildings (ZEB) does not result in harmful emissions to water, soil and air. In contrast, ZEBs produce energy, water and resources. Therefore, the definition of ZEBs in this paper goes well beyond the definition of (Net) Zero Energy Buildings, which focuses primarily on greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels. The concept o...

Community-scale modeling is a rapidly growing area of interest for planners, policy makers, and researchers. There are, however, few software tools that enable large-scale parametric studies of communities based on detailed energy models of buildings. This paper presents a tool called Params-NZP for automatically generating and running full EnergyPlus models for the parametric analysis of entir...

As one part of a broader validation study, this paper examines the many aspects of a validation dataset for daylight simulation and their likely contributions to uncertainty in simulation results. It uses two complementary empirical datasets: one, a simple test cell in Berkeley California and the other, a complex Net Zero Energy Building (NZEB) on Isle de La Reunion. The study aims to reveal th...