Retrofitting a high-rise residential building to reduce energy use by a factor of 10
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis details the ways in which energy is consumed in an existing Canadian high-rise apartment building and outlines a strategy to reduce its consumption of grid purchased energy by 90%.Grid purchased energy is targeted because the building is located in Saskatchewan where energy is predominantly generated from fossil fuels that release greenhouse gas emissions into the environment.Greenhouse gas emissions are targeted because of the growing consensus that human activities are the cause of recent global climate destabilization and the general trend towards global warming.Energy consumption is also a concern because of anticipated resource shortages resulting from increases in both global population and average per capita consumption.Many researchers are beginning to claim that a factor 10 reduction in energy use by industrialized nations will be required in order for our civilization to be sustainable.The building that was studied is an 11 story seniors high-rise with a total above ground floor area of 8,351 m 2 .It was constructed in 1985, in Saskatoon, SK, and it is an average user of energy for this region of the world and for a building of its size and type.Numerous field measurements were taken in the building, both during this study and previously by the Saskatchewan Research Council.These measurements were used to create a computer model of the building using EE4.After the computer model of the building was created different energy saving retrofits were simulated and compared.Over 40 retrofits are presented and together they reduce the annual grid purchased energy of the building from 360 kWh/m 2 (based on above ground floor area) to 36 kWh/m 2 , a factor 10 reduction.Natural gas consumption was reduced by approximately 94% and grid purchased electrical consumption was reduced by approximately 81%.As a result of these energy savings, a factor 6.6 reduction (85%) in greenhouse gas emissions was also achieved.The goal of factor 10 could not be achieved only through energy conservation and the final design includes two solar
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".