04-04-2025
Total U.S. building energy use topic of FORNL talk April 8
A distinguished scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who has led the creation of computer models of energy use in nearly every residential and commercial building in the United States will speak Tuesday, April 8, to Friends of ORNL. The models are proving useful for scientists and businesses.
'An energy model of every U.S. building: Science and business uses' is the title of a talk that will be presented to FORNL by Joshua New of the Grid-Interactive Controls Group in the Electrification and Energy Infrastructure Division at ORNL.
In 2024 he received the international R&D 100 'Researcher of the Year' award. In 2016 he won an R&D 100 award (Oscar of Invention) titled, 'Roof Savings Calculator Suite.'
The free presentation is open to the public and will be held at noon at the UT Resource Center, 1201 Oak Ridge Turnpike. Sandwiches, chips, cookies and drinks will be available at 11:15 a.m. at the UT Resource Center for a donation of $10 on a first-come, first-served basis.
To view the virtual presentation, click on the talk title on the website homepage and then click on the Zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture. You can view it the next day by clicking on 'Past Talks' on the website's navigation bar.
New is also a joint faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and Bredesen Center at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he received the Outstanding Mentor Award in 2024 and his Ph.D. in computer science in 2009.
He has more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. He managed research portfolios for the Building Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy that totaled more than $25 million while he was on loan to the Department of Energy. Over the past 15 years, he led more than 225 projects totaling $350 million.
'More than 125 million residential and commercial buildings in the United States account for 40% of the nation's primary energy use and 73% to 80% of electricity use on the nation's grid,' he said. 'The total energy cost of operating buildings in the United States is $370 billion per year.
'Scientists at ORNL are leveraging high-performance computing resources to simplify building-specific decisions and to provide major industry partners with data necessary to increase deployment of energy-efficient and other building technologies to help meet national goals.
'After five years of effort, the team I led successfully created a model of every U.S. building in 2020. Our building energy model is an open-source tool. We achieved breakthroughs in urban scale energy modeling made possible by artificial intelligence, computer vision and big data processing.
'The digital twin data for 125.7 million U.S. buildings and 122 million models have been made open source. We developed software to help inform best practices for urban-scale energy modeling.'
A digital twin is a virtual copy of a real-world object that accurately reflects its physical counterpart; it is able to be updated with real-time digital data in an effort to determine how to optimize the performance of the real-world object, such as a building.
'In the past five years, I have been working with key partners in several multibillion-dollar industries to enhance the data and models for practical uses in actionable business decisions,' New continued. 'Yet, even more exciting multi-trillion-dollar opportunities exist for resilience, insurance and automated financing of building investments.
'In my talk, I will present some of DOE's national goals, scientific breakthroughs, a roadmap for how to create a digital twin of every building in a nation, ways this information is being used currently, and some thoughts regarding how this new information could help scale up existing industries or create new ones.'
The ORNL data on individual American buildings' energy use, energy demand, emissions and costs has been made publicly available, he said. 'It can be used in scaling up the total effect on the nation of all building operations.'
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Total U.S. building energy use topic of Friends of ORNL talk April 8
