Industry Partners Use ORNL Software to Trim Carbon Footprint of Buildings

Two years after the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory provided a model of nearly every building in America, commercial partners are using the tool for tasks ranging from designing energy-efficient buildings and cities to linking energy efficiency to real estate value and risk. International companies like Google and SmithGroup are sharing the benefits by making the resulting data publicly available. Since the buildings sector accounts for 40 percent of American energy consumption, increasing its efficiency is vital to national decarbonization goals.

Dozens of companies have requested data from ORNL’s Automatic Building Energy Modeling software suite, or AutoBEM, said project leader Joshua New. He and his team developed AutoBEM using high-performance computing to process layers of imaging data with information about individual buildings, such as their size, use, construction materials, and heating and cooling technologies.