Feasibility of achieving net-zero energy performance in high-rise buildings using solar energy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As part of a broad strategy to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming, many countries are requiring all new buildings to have net-zero energy use. This requires that on-site energy use not exceed on-site generation of renewable energy (taken here to be solar energy), or equivalently, that the building Energy Use Intensity (EUI, kWh/m2a) not exceed the supply of on-site solar energy (electricity and heat) per m2 of floor area per year. On this basis, we find that achieving net-zero energy performance in an archetype 40-story square building in 16 different cities of North America requires EUI of 17-24 kWh/m2a using PV panels, and 19-28 kWh/m2a using PVT collectors. Changing building orientation to a non-square floor shape can improve maximum permitted EUI by up to 50% in PV and 60% in PVT case. Conversely, the best-performing residential and commercial buildings have EUIs of 50-75 kWh/m2a. Only if building heights are limited to 5-10 floors does the available solar energy, and thus the permitted EUI, reach 50-75 kWh/m2a. Therefore, we recommend that policymakers not require high-rise buildings to be net-zero energy, unless they are prepared to limit building heights to 5-10 floors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".