Continuous Building Energy Modeling Concept in a Building’s Lifecycle with a Case Study

Building Energy Modeling (BEM) is crucial for improving energy efficiency, minimizing energy consumption, and ensuring occupant comfort. Accurate BEM offers many benefits and insights for sustainable practices throughout a building's lifecycle. However, continuous BEM is often underutilized for improving energy efficiency and decarbonization of the grid, particularly when combining multiple tools that accurately estimate energy consumption, detect abnormality, and offer sustainable recommendations. This study addresses the gap in continuous BEM throughout a building's lifecycle, emphasizing the role of dynamic schedule adjustments for the HVAC system to optimize energy consumption. The project team conducted a case study of an institutional building in the Pacific Northwest. BEM was completed using Sefaira, assuming the same efforts were made during the design phase, and then an OpenStudio model was created to re-evaluate the energy simulation in comparison to the real energy consumption data during the operational phase. This research examines the benefits of using Sefaira during the design phase and OpenStudio during the operational phase for continuous BEM and simulation in its specific climate and building system schedule. The findings suggest that optimizing the schedule by implementing an optimum morning warm-up can enhance energy consumption, especially through the customization of the schedule in Openstudio. As a result, energy consumption can be reduced over the building’s lifecycle. This study underscores the necessity of integrating continuous energy modeling practices throughout a building's lifecycle to achieve better energy management and sustainability.