We are pleased to announce that Yujie Xu has been named a 2017-18 Steinbrenner Fellow by the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research at CMU.
Yujie received a MS in Architecture from Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture in 2015 and earned her BS from Tsinghua University in 2011. In 2017, she won first prize in the CMU Student Energy Week Poster and Multimedia Competition.
As a Steinbrenner Fellow, Yujie receives a full-year scholarship to conduct her research, titled: Data-driven Spatial-temporal Model to Analyze the Energy, Climate and Environmental Impact of Building Stock Energy Conservation Measures. She is advised by Vivian Loftness, Azizan Aziz, and Edson Severnini.
Buildings account for 40% of U.S. energy consumption and 39% of U.S. carbon emissions, with emissions growing by 1.8% per year for commercial buildings. The U.S. is no longer a leader; worldwide buildings consume 20% of the total delivered energy (site energy), anticipated to increase by an average of 1.5% per year. Reducing the energy consumption and carbon emissions of the U.S. building sector is critical to mitigate GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions and global climate change, as well as to improve air quality and environmental resiliency. Yet federal and industrial funding for university-based research focused on the building sector is at an all-time low.
This project aims to develop a bottom-up data-driven spatial-temporal model to analyze the energy, climate, and environmental impact of building energy conservation measures (ECM) under alternative climate and environment scenarios. The project combines methods and results in building science, data science, public policy, machine learning, and geo-spatial data analysis to address the following questions:
- How would a proposed set of energy efficiency retrofit strategies for buildings impact the short-term and long-term energy use with associated benefits for climate change and air pollution mitigation?
- Does the optimal short-term ECM strategy differ from the optimal long-term strategy?
- How would different projected climate and environment conditions impact the relative effectiveness of proposed ECMs and change the optimal long-term ECM strategy?