Who is this for: Architects, engineers, vendors and sustainable engineers involved with building energy analysis.
By: Mohammad Rahmani Asl, Ph.D. Student, BIM-SIM Group, Texas A&M University, Working in Collaboration with Autodesk.
For design teams working to reduce a building’s energy use, the Potential Energy Savings (PES) chart is a tool to focus their limited time on only the features of a building’s design, construction, and systems that can save the most energy. Using the PES Chart design teams get a high level understanding of how sensitive the building’s energy performance is to each parameter.
As a follow-up on the product announcement for the PES chart in Green Building Studio (GBS) we wanted to share with you another video (See the previous video here). This video shows how the PES chart in GBS can help design teams quickly understand and align on how to improve the energy performance of their projects. PES can be accessed from Autodesk Revit, Autodesk Vasari and directly from GBS.
Your feedback is important to us! Use this video and try out the PES, tell us what you think. What do you like? What should we do next? Are there areas of Green Building Studio where you would like to see more detailed videos?
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Hi,
I would like to give some feedback on the Potential Energy Savings feature. I'm writing a master thesis on Building Energy Performance using BIM, and am testing the in-Revit Conceptual Energy Analysis potential, and this is what I find.
Let me start off by telling you that I like the new feature. I like how it gives an easy to grasp graphical representation of potential improvements. That being said, I have a remark (and I think this is something that's missing in the Revit Conceptual Energy Analysis in general).
This feature is fully built upon the energy usage improvement of different building features, but lacks functionality to make an informed economical decision about these building features. A building feature yielding a big possible improvement, but having a huge additional cost for improvement might not be the option you want to explore. Right now this additional cost evaluation is still a fully manual process that the user needs to do on top of the energy analysis. But as the economical and ecological decision making are closely related and both very important in building design, it would be great to have the additional cost of feature improvement evaluated (just like the energy analysis based on generalized values provided by Autodesk based on the American market). I think this would improve the usability of the feature a lot, certainly for smaller designing parties with less technical knowledge and resources.
I hope this message doesn't go unnoticed,
Keep up the good work,
Jasper
Posted by: Jasper Desmet | Tuesday, July 30, 2013 at 02:04 AM
Jasper - Thank you so much for taking the time out to provide us feedback. We agree that the PES chart is a great tool that helps identify areas of sensitivity for your building design and the addition of cost sensitivity would make the feature even more powerful. We are definitely aware of the need for cost sensitivity analysis as an important component when evaluating the viability of performance improvements. Indeed, we almost pursued it for our first release, but the technical hurdles to providing good cost data proved to be too much effort for a first release of new technology. This improvement is very high on our priority list, and we hope to be able to include cost related information soon in a future release. Your input and input from others like you are what help us decide what to release next, so please know that you and other have been heard on this feature request and please keep the comments coming. Thank you again for taking the time to provide us feedback and we wish you the very best on your master’s thesis.
Posted by: Emile | Tuesday, July 30, 2013 at 05:46 PM