Ezra's Round Table / Systems Seminar: Les Norford '73 (MIT) - Space-conditioning systems for low-carbon buildings and grids

Description

Following the oil shocks of the early 1970s, efforts to reduce building energy use were largely motivated by fuel supply and demand and associated costs. In the new and increasingly urbanized millennium, buildings are associated with emissions of anthropogenic heat that are particularly undesirable in tropical cites and emissions of carbon that have global impact. The talk will share models and quantitative insights for carbon- and cost-friendly space-conditioning systems and offer a few speculations about district-level energy systems that align with grid decarbonization . Topics include model-predictive control of HVAC systems to optimize response to both power and ancillary service markets, the latter incentivizing short-term demand variations to compensate for fluctuations in wind- and PY-produced electricity supply; separation of latent and sensible cooling, enabling the use of desiccants and membranes to remove water vapor with less work than that associated with conventional cooling coils; and buoyancy-driven ventilation systems, enhanced with comfort heating or cooling as needed.

Bio:
Leslie Norford is the George Macomber (1948) Professor in Construction Management in the Department of Architecture at MIT. His research focuses on reducing building energy use and associated resource consumption and carbon emissions, with recent emphasis on interactions of buildings with urban environments and with electricity grids, low-energy HVAC systems and regional carbon-reduction planning. He has conducted measurement campaigns and numerical analyses of building energy consumption and air quality in China, India, Norway, Pakistan, Russia and the UK. The ongoing research of his group in the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) includes measurements and models of urban microclimates, with a focus on identifying strategies to reduce the urban heat island effect. Working with mechanical and electrical engineering students at MIT, he is identifying how control of HVAC systems can help electric utilities control peak demand and mitigate the impact of power fluctuations associated with wind and PV systems through provision of such services as power reserves and frequency regulation.