5.4: Exercise IV- Energy transition

The brief

In the Netherlands, as in many other countries, there are far-reaching plans for reducing the energy consumption required by housing, such as the envisaged energy transition (https://www.government.nl/topics/renewable-energy/central-government-promotes-energy-savings, https://www.iea.org/reports/the-netherlands-2020). Despite the wide acceptance of the necessity of energy reduction and climate improvement, these plans meet with opposition, reluctance, operational complexity and failure. Particularly painful are cases where apparently straightforward improvements, such as the placing of solar panels on roofs, turn out to be a waste of public and private investment. Practically all websites on solar panels are clear about the required conditions, such as roof size and orientation. Still, as any walk through a Dutch town or suburb reveals, there are many, presumably subsidized, panel configurations that are too small or improperly oriented, delivering only around 25% of the expected performance. This even happens in new construction, which suggests that the reasons for failure are deep and significant.

A wise municipality acknowledges the immensity of the task and, rather than rushing into action and wasting time and money in questionable procedures and unproductive subsidies, wants to start from understanding the possibilities and limitations for the existing housing stock: how can they ascertain what can be done with each individual residential building, which retrofit packages apply to different categories in the municipality and what the costs and performance of energetic refurbishments can be.

To this effect, they hire you to manage the process of information collection, with the following brief:

1. Determine which information is necessary for each existing residential building: what we need to know to evaluate the existing situation, determine which improvements are required or possible and estimate the costs and effects of these improvements. The information should be explicitly linked to parts of the building, such as components in the building envelope and the building services. In addition to building information, also consider the usage of buildings (activities deployed in them, type of occupants, energy consumption).
2. Decide how this information should be organized in BIM, so that there is a complete and reliable model of each building in the municipality: which symbols, properties and relations accommodate the information in the model. Assume that there is affordable and reliable storage for the models.
3. Design a process for collecting data about each dwelling in a way that the information in BIM is permanently up to date. The municipality does not want to be burdened with the costs of periodical visits to every building, in which some expert inspects and documents what has changed since the last visit. They prefer to have an automatic system that connects to all relevant sources, stakeholders and actors, from the drawing in the archives of architectural offices to maintenance activities such as replacing a window pane. They want all involved parties to have access to the model of a building, be supported by the information it contains and, in return, update it with the results of their actions (e.g. change the type and construction year of the window panel).
4. Explain how the collection of models could help with the development of retrofit packages for the whole building stock in the municipality and how these packages could be matched to specific properties (e.g. how insulation needs in the building stock can be clustered into types and matched to solutions). This should be the foundation of municipal strategies for energetic improvement and is perhaps the most important product of the project (its culmination from the perspective of the client).

Deliverables

1. Process and information diagrams, accompanied by short explanatory comments
2. A draft of a short policy document that summarizes the diagrams
3. Incomplete model in a BIM editor containing a typical case and demonstrations of your solutions

Evaluation criteria

1. The process diagrams should:
   1. Make all actors, stakeholders and tasks explicit
   2. Include feedback loops in decision making
   3. Have no unnecessary bridges
2. The information diagrams should:
   1. Indicate which symbols, properties and relations are essential for this project
   2. Allow to detect how information is derived from primary data
   3. Contain clear measures for safeguarding information quality (given the extent of the project)
   4. Explain the relations between individual buildings and the whole building sock (i.e. between private project management and municipal strategies or policies)
3. The model in BIM should contain:
   1. All relevant symbols of an indicative case
   2. Schedules for the necessary calculations

Roles

If the exercise is a group assignment, consider roles for the following aspects:

• Process management
• Information management
• BIM modelling
• Analyses in BIM (using schedules)
• Policy development
• Building documentation (emphasis on efficient solutions for large-scale data collection)
• Energetic solutions and performance (technical aspects underlying the choice of building features and retrofit packages)