Optimal planning tools for carbon neutral neighborhoods by integrating existing buildings

Decentralized or distributed energy systems can be strategy for establishing carbon neutral city by utilising on-site or renewable energy technology. Moreover, the key motivation of Zero Energy Building (ZEB) is also to utilize distributed energy resources as well as energy efficient systems. Various scales of energy systems are strongly related each other and different levels of energy efficiency improvements are gaining importance. This research, thus, focuses on the boundary of the building, thereby not being limited to only a single building but spanning over a cluster of buildings, so called "Carbon Neutral Neighborhood". Proposed optimal planning tool is designed to be useful for supporting the energy engineer's decision making to find suitable technological combinations and operations in order to minimize the target objectives such as primary energy consumption, environmental impact or life cycle cost. In order to search the optimal solution, Multi-Objective Building Performance Optimization Software (MOBO) was used as an optimization method. The validity of the methodology of the tools was verified by applying the case study on a group of existing campus building stocks with the energy demand data resource. The methodology proposed in the research presents the idea to utilise energy data resources for finding carbon neutral planning.