Dr. Therese Peffer, the associate director for CIEE and the CITRIS Climate initiative, was awarded the 2024 Best Paper Award from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) with Drs. Carlos Duarte Roa and Paul Raftery from the Center for the Built Environment and Anand Prakash from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Duarte Roa served as the lead author; Peffer was the principal investigator behind the research project, titled Brick, that generated the paper.
The paper, “Field Demonstration of the Brick Ontology to Scale up the Deployment of ASHRAE Guideline 36 Control Sequences,” presents a standardized solution for implementing advanced building control sequences that allow heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to operate more efficiently. The team applied four standardization projects—Brick, BACnet, OpenBuildingControl’s Control Description Language, and ASHRAE Guideline 36—and open-source support tools in an office building in Berkeley, California to demonstrate a scalable and portable control system that can unlock energy and cost savings across different buildings.
