What is it about?
Residential retrofitting helps to reduce energy consumption and carbon emission. In addition, it also helps to reduce energy bills and increase the comfort of households. This work helps to tackle and understand three main challenges in residential retrofitting, (i) technical barriers in identifying and implementing retrofitting, (ii) people's behavior under different socio-economic settings, and (iii) lack of financial resources and funding programs. In this work, we (i) formulate a novel two-step strategy to maximize energy savings at optimal cost at the household-appliance level and (ii) devise two investment strategies considering household behavior and characteristics. We also consider equity and the behavior of the people in our formulation.
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Why is it important?
Residential houses account for ~17% of the GHG emissions in the US. As we all head towards net zero emissions by 2050, residential retrofitting is vital in reducing GHG emissions and achieving climate goals. Our work also helps policymakers to make informed decisions based on a data-driven approach to develop policies focusing on income-based and location-based equitable retrofitting programs. The two innovative investment strategies also help tackle some financial challenges in retrofitting.
Perspectives
The residential sector needs de-carbonization. There are multiple ways to achieve this goal. This work sheds light on retrofitting building stock as a solution to get closer to reducing energy footprint. I hope this article inspires people to contribute towards using data-driven AI techniques and optimization methods for sustainable energy systems. Note: This article was contributed by two authors of the paper: Aparna Kishore and Swapna Thorve.
Swapna Thorve
Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Budget-constrained optimal and equitable retrofitting problems for achieving energy efficiency, June 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3575813.3597354.
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