Energy Use in Buildings
Decarbonizing Large Commercial Buildings Through Heat Recovery and Storage
This project will demonstrate a large new-to-market heat recovery chiller that uses a refrigerant with an ultra-low greenhouse warming potential to reduce the emissions from a hospital’s heating and cooling system, and make it easier to scale this demonstration to other hospitals.
The decarbonization of existing large commercial buildings is an urgent need, but yet one without a current solution due to technical and economic challenges. Leading technologies such as air-to-water heat pumps applied in new construction are not well suited for retrofits. The cost of retrofitting a heating plant to be fully electric is prohibitive for most projects, but even for well-resourced building owners who are committed to decarbonizing their building infrastructure, justifying all-electric solutions is difficult because they are not economically competitive.
The project will install a new large heat recovery screw chiller that uses an ultra-low greenhouse warming potential refrigerant at an existing hospital building owned by a healthcare partner. Hospitals are ideal for this field test as they are high energy use intensity buildings that require near constant simultaneous heating and cooling. Further, this project aims to reduce the time to adoption by focusing on the highest energy use intensity buildings where overlooked opportunities for partial decarbonization can be deeply effective and economical. Focusing on a portfolio owner (such as our healthcare partner) as early adopters can also lead the way for initial scaling.
The team will measure the effects of the demonstration over a year pre-and post- installation and use that information to estimate savings.The team will also evaluate the advantage of this solution over leading alternatives across multiple building types with extensive energy and economic analyses and further establish this through the detailed analysis of the early generation of all-electric plants already in operation. Finally, the team will conduct stakeholder interviews to compile lessons learned and success stories from early, all-electric projects; develop a design tool, a design guide, and case studies; and conduct extensive industry outreach.
The project aims to be an industry game changer for demonstrating a solution that is simple, cost-effective, and scalable.
