Implementing Early Energy Modeling in an Architectural Practice

DAN STINE: Hello, everyone. Thanks for attending my session, implementing early energy modeling, and architectural practice. First I want to tell you a little bit about myself and Lake|Flato architects in case you haven't heard of either before. So my name is Dan Stine. I am a registered architect in the state of Wisconsin. I am a graduate architecture student teacher adjunct at North Dakota State University.

I have authored 14 textbooks over the years. One of them is the number one Revit textbook in North America. I do a lot of blogging, on my own blog BIM chapters, writing about the topic of this session quite a bit as well as Enscape on their website. I'm an international speaker. I've presented all over the world on all things BIM including Singapore, Australia, several places in Europe, Toronto, Vancouver, and then several places in the US as well.

I'm currently the chair of the National IES BIM Standards Committee. And most recently an exciting project I just helped wrap up. I'm the co-author, one of six people. Two people at Lake Flato, two people at [INAUDIBLE], and then two other individuals we were hired by the AIA to write the AIA Climate Action Guide for Practice. Which will hopefully be coming out on the AIA's website sometime in the near future. Perhaps what that name might be a different name by the time it goes live.

Really quickly about my role that you may find interesting. It's a new role that I started when I came on to Lake Flato two years ago, director of design technology. One year ago that is. I have three areas that I work in, which touch basically all aspects of the firm. Part of that time goes towards information and design technology, working with our BIM manager, Steven Campbell and our director of IT, Robert Trinidad.

I also spend a fair amount of my time in sustainable design and building performance tasks, working with our Director of Building Performance, Heather Holdridge, and the building performance team which I'll talk more about in a little bit. And then I also do some dedicated marketing and public relations things like unto this presentation I'm giving right now promoting the firm's brand and use of design technology.

Lake Flato is a approximately 30-year-old company based here in San Antonio, Texas. We also have an office in Austin, Texas. In 2004 we were the AIA firm of the year. At the end of 2019, ARCHITECT magazine ranked us the number one firm in their architect top 50 list. We've won more of the AIA's top 10 award their highest award for sustainable design than any other architecture firm in the United States. So 13 in counting at the moment.

2014 we were inducted into the Interior Design Magazine Hall of Fame. And we've been member of the AIA 2030 Commitment Signatory, since pretty much it began 10 years ago. We were named one of the most innovative architecture firms in the world by Fast Company.

And we have six books published that you can buy in Amazon and other book outlets on projects that we've worked on. We have a forthcoming book that hasn't come out yet that's going to be published by Rizzoli on our latest residential projects. The image here on the screen is the Austin Central Library which we earned a AIA award for in 2020.

Just showing a little hierarchy, we have a lot of success in sustainable design and it hasn't happened by accident. So we have this structure related to building performance where we have the director Heather Holdridge I mentioned, we have a sustainable design coordinator Kate Sector, and also working with her as an intern based out of Houston, that Cynthia Suarez.

And then each Studio so residential higher ed, our [? Ecocon ?] Studio, et cetera, they have one person that's identified as the sustainability champion for the entire Studio. We have regular meetings with them and they're in charge of messaging and helping keep goals on point, but then each project also has a sustainability champion within the project team. This is just a quick peek at design performance action plan that we're currently updating, and it has three overarching primary goals of related to practice, people, and the planet.

Couple of objectives from within this document are for example indoor environmental quality. We have goals and use tools to help us meet those goals. So view analysis tools using Rhino and some Grasshopper scripting, annual daylight simulations using climate Studio. Here's an example of our 10-- Well in this case, it's nine years worth of reporting.

We just did the 10th year recently. And then the AIA takes all that from all the firms and comes out with the annual average in an annual report that they do. So here is nine years worth of reporting, the higher the bar, the better. So you can see we've consistently been above average except for in 2015, and working our way back up since then to be better than average of all the firms that actually report.

Another objective related to operational carbon is to do energy modeling and PV analysis, which is a big part of this presentation today. So more on that later. And then embody carbon we use tools like tally and add in for Revit to calculate global warming potential on our projects. And then before we get into the implementation I want to make sure that we're all on the same page in terms of Revit and Insight. What we're talking about implementing. There are different tools that exist out there, but today we're talking about this Revit plus insight, both Autodesk tools that we are using in our practice.

Big picture, there's two main ingredients that you need when you're going to start energy model and insight. And so from Revit you need the building geometry, and it could be Revit elements: walls, floors, ceilings, roofs or it could just be massing elements, or it could be a combination of both. So that all encompasses the Revit model, and then you also need your location on Earth.

Nothing else matters at that point. You don't have to know what the R value of the walls and roofs are, you don't need to know what the orientation on the site is. And that's because down here in step 2, Insight takes a range of values for every input and calculates them all, and then you get this opportunity to adjust the lower range and the upper range for each input, and that leads us to item number three where we get this real-time predictive EUI feedback.

Until you've narrowed it down to one input, you're getting the mean EUI. So that's where these dials come in across the bottom that have different colors. Red is bad, orange means it's meeting actually 90.1, and green means it's meeting architecture 2030 or better like NET ZERO. And then an optional thing tied into what I've already mentioned, item number four in the upper right is we have the ability to export the predictive UI information to the AIA's document data exchange. So that the AIA 2030 commitment reporting can be done directly from Insight.

One of the things that a lot of people ask me when they start looking at some new tool, and in this case Autodesk's energy modeling tool, is it accurate? And so this validation page sort of speaks to that. The Insight engine uses one of the nationally recognized engines DOE 2.2 and Energy plus depending on what piece within Revit and Insight you're using.

As I understand it in the future it'll all be Energy plus all the time. It's also been validated per ASHRAE Standard 140. So that requires you do a bunch of testing against some standard buildings and then you publish all the results. So this has been validated and tested since 2008. And as you can read here it's also certified by the US Department of Energy.

Autodesk maintains its own climate server. So there's 2000 physical weather stations typically at airports using the TMY2 data. They also have 1.6 million virtual weather stations. And there's a blog across the bottom, and if you go to BIM chapters and search Autodesk climate server, you'll see a post that I also wrote about this.

Autodesk is a research partner with gbXML.org and trying to develop this level three compliance which gets to improved geometry accuracy for the energy model and the automation of the energy analysis model. So what does automation mean in this case, you can see an example, in the upper left there's a small two story l-shaped building and the floor for the balcony, and the roof for the canopy are all monolithic with the main floor of the building and the main roof of the building.

And in the center graphic at the top, you can see that floor and that roof just projecting out. It also happens to be pointing out a sloped floor. And when you create the energy analysis model from within Revit, the results are shown on the right. Some analytical surfaces are hidden here, but you can see that the floor and the roof for the balcony have been separated and become shade surfaces. They're not transferring any heat from the inside to the outside or heat or cold. And we can also see that the parapet has become a shade surface as well.

And then finally, the floor at the main level and the second level are the same Revit floor element, but on the right, you can see insight was able to discern that the floor at the bottom is a slab on grade. And then the next floor was analytically is an interior floor.

One more example in the lower left, you can see this wall maybe it's a tilt up precast panel that goes from the top of footing to above the top of the roof as one single element, while the graphic on to the right of that, the bottom center image shows the result and the energy analysis model is that single wall being broken up into three separate analytical surfaces. Below the defined grade level is an underground or below grade wall. And then above that's an exterior wall. And then once you get above the roof it becomes a shade surface.

And not to make too big of a deal out of this I'd rather have you use some tool than no tool. But another tool in the same space by Trimble is Sefaira, and this will use the entire wall from top to bottom and transfer that into the energy analysis model, rather than breaking it up. So there help documentation would have you split up the wall when if it's a precast tilt up panel you probably wouldn't want to do that, you'd have to make a copy of the model and do some destructive edits basically to get the energy model to read properly.

But again using Sefaira or Cove tool are much preferred over not doing anything, as we'll talk more about in a little bit. Here's an example of the geometric accuracy comparing a physical Revit model to the resultant energy analysis model. You can see that for this fairly simple orthogonal building it's 1.6% different, which is really great compared to the traditional methods where some complex geometry is oversimplified. Using this workflow you can do things like try different inputs and locations for the same building.

We recently worked on a white paper that you can see the link for it across the bottom, with one of our many consultants on an actual project the rendering that you see on the screen is for this project. And the main thrust of the test was to show that there is a point of diminishing returns on adding insulation to the walls and roofs, but then we also then to broaden the horizons of this white paper we tried this same design in different locations in other climate zones.

Interestingly enough because insight is able to calculate both the predictive UI and [? TBTU ?] per square foot per year, and the cost per square foot per year. And it can do the cost because insight being a cloud based tool has access to the National utility database I guess is what you'd call it. And so the cost if one location is using geothermal to create electricity is going to be different relatively speaking, to other climate zones.

So that's interesting but the UI and the cost are not one to one. And so this white paper gets into some of that. Another interesting thing with this automation of the energy analysis model. Here's a Revit model and then a mass element added next to it to depict a future addition. Insight or-- Well, this is before insight. So Revit will automatically make that area between the mass and the existing building, and interior wall even though that's one large Revit wall that extends past the mass.

And then here's a couple of slides showing that-- Well actually I think we're just looking at one slide right now, the idea of being able to submit your final UI information to the AIA 2030 commitment. And then finally, before we get into the implementation there's two more slides here on the workflow Revit and insight.

One of the things that's super significant about this workflow and makes it really interesting is that you can share that cloud-based energy model project with other people who don't even know how to use Revit. They don't even have Revit, long as they have a connection to the internet. They don't even necessarily need a Autodesk account they don't believe. Although you can make one of those for free.

If you share the insight project with somebody, they can open the project adjust those widgets upper and lower range I was speaking of, they can save scenarios and that gives a broader range of people on a project the opportunity to contribute to trying to understand what the goals are and meet them. And then this is a slide that shows that there's a scalable option. As you look at early energy modeling, and then the project is more refined, and more of the details are known, this shows that if you use spaces.

So you don't need rooms at all to create an energy model, the Revit room element if it exists only uses the name and number. But if a space exists and you go into the energy settings dialog and tell it to use spaces, it'll pull in all this extra special information that exists and can be defined within spaces like specific heating cooling set points and occupancy schedules.

And so if you just had one room that was different like an apparatus Bay has a different occupancy schedule, and a different HVAC system like unit heaters, you can put one space in that apparatus Bay and set all these things and then the rest of the building is going to use the default settings. Insight is not perfect itself. It has no way to crop a model, so it's all or nothing.

If you're just trying to model the penthouse at the top of a 30 story building, which we had to do recently, you typically have to make a copy of it and just delete all that stuff below. There are some other destructive things you could do like making everything not room bonding, but there's also no support for secondary design options. Large beam elements can be a challenge. As you see on the far right, these are the only categories that Revit looks at when it's creating the energy analysis model. So structural beams are not in this list nor is the generic model category.

There's too many variables that would exist in generic model. So those categories are missing and therefore a large beam that's exposed around the perimeter of the building, could end up resulting in a large gap that insight can't close off. And of course this workflow does not replace something that the mechanical engineer would do, even further down the road towards the end of the project, or [? NCDs ?] replacing trane traces is not what this tool is meant to do.

And then beyond insight, you can export that the insight project to go to DOE-2, Energy plus, and gbXML raw formats, and in those could be used in other ways, like importing into trane trace 700 which I'm showing here. Now to the implementation point, now that we have all that information in mind, what we're talking about implementing and the fact that we're an architect only firm we don't have in-house MEP or structural or other consultants.

There's three or six main ingredients really five with a sixth optional one I suppose. But management and staff buy-in are absolutely critical. Training and support really need to be well defined and thought out, and then documentation to back up that training and support. These are all really critical ingredients and then like I said optional, but highly recommended to really force the whole firm forward is this commitment to the AIA 2030 challenge.

Management Buy-in at Lake Flato and even at my previous firm has been overwhelmingly supportive of this effort to streamline, and be more consistent, and deliver it and do early-energy modeling early and at multiple points in the project. And part of that support is not only promoting it in our practice but also promoting it in our industry.

So here you can see on the left a presentation I did at the Minnesota AIA convention, on the Revit plus insight workflow. And then even more recently on the right for the AIA [? fully ?] COTE working group. I did a presentation on how insight works. So promoting this in our industry is also a big part of what I've been doing.

Staff buy-in. So as you might imagine with all the things we've spoke about that the firm is pretty supportive of energy modeling, the management, and staff. But to be fair everybody's got a lot of interests and things competing for their time. So we really need to do this implementation in a very thoughtful structured way, and have ways of tracking progress on projects. So and then on top of that, we strive to promote staff that have had success using the tool, and whether that's in a staff meeting, or our monthly champions challenge where we have a guest speaker often promote somebody internally.

That's done something not necessarily related to Revit insight but anything related to sustainable design like an embodied carbon study on a project. Here's a quote from one of our architects Michael Salinas, and I'll let you read that. Talking about his impression after having some training and have used it on a couple of projects. And it being Revit and Autodesk insight.

Another thing that we do to promote staff awareness and buy-in is every new hire receives a one hour orientation on design performance and technology. So myself and our sustainable design coordinator Kate Sector, we give this presentation and in the lower right is one of the slides from that slide deck where we ask every new employee to get some sort of building performance accreditation within the first six months, and it's all paid for except for their time studying. And if they already have one and they want to pursue a second one there's a stipend available for that.

So now to the staff training. Staff training is provided often and to whomever and whenever they want it actually. So we've done some firm wide training more than once. And these are always recorded and made available to watch later, particularly great for new people who started after the training was done.

We also do Studio level training. So if we're focusing on higher end versus residential some of the topics that we'll cover like baseline information, and codes, and things like that, will vary a little bit. And then project level and individual level are often on demand. They may be scheduled but we'll try to provide that training whenever they need it, and not just say go watch the video, we've already done that.

We want to continue to be as supportive as possible to make everyone and our projects and ultimately our clients successful. Staff support is critical that is similar to the training. We need to be able to provide just in time training when they're having problems with the energy model not closing, or not getting the results that they're expecting, and help go through the model, and the results, and find out what's going on so that we can continue to have predictable accurate results.

So here's an example of a graphic I made showing all the different ways in which the energy model breaks up the Revit model. So similar to what we spoke about earlier. One thing we didn't mention is there's a large massing element on the right that ends up creating a shade surface mimicking an existing adjacent building. Slightly off topic, but I also teach this energy modeling and lighting analysis and other BIM related things to my class, my BIM class at NDSU graduate architecture student's.

Documentation is really important. One of the handout that you'll get with this class or this presentation has a lot of tips and tricks that you'll be able to use and having something like this available for staff can be really helpful. And to that, that same end having some sort of reference material related to the values available for the different inputs, for example on the right if your firm works in specific climate zones, or specific occupancy types, you can have some guidance for your staff to know when to pick which option.

And that may have some related information pulled out of Autodesk help system on the left, you can see what single clear, double clear, what those options that you see on the right are. What the solar heat gain coefficient and the visual light transmittance and the values are for each of those.

And then finally, just that commitment that I spoke about, making sure that you commit in such a way that it forces the firm to report on their entire portfolio. This doesn't require you to meet the standard and none of what you report is public. It's all anonymous. It is all collected and averaged. So that we have overall information on how the industry and particularly the firms that have committed are doing.

In the lower left is a quote from their annual report by the numbers, AIA 2030 by the numbers. Where it talks about energy modeling is essential, and the firms that do energy modeling have a 54% reduction from the baseline versus firms that don't do energy modeling of 42%. In the annual by the numbers report does a spread on our firm, is just a little plug Lake Flato here, with some quotes from Heather Holdridge on presentation that she has given many times and how to get started on the AIA 2030 commitment for an architectural firm, creating a sustainable design, action plan, and things like that.

Again in insight you can report directly to the AIA document data exchange. This is an intermediate dialogue you can adjust a few things before it's pushed out from Insight to the AIA, and then this is on the AIA side. This is a little different now they've just made some changes over the last few months, and how this is all formatted but--

Finally I just have a couple of minutes left and I had have the opportunity I'm part of a beta program for some big updates coming for the next Gen of insight and just knowing the investments Autodesk is making in this space really helps drive home the value in investing in this workflow as a firm, considering it's included in the Revit cost. You don't pay for each run. There's no cloud credits involved.

The first thing is everything we've shown pretty much in terms of what Insight does is related to operational carbon, but there's a big push to start to include to get to this total carbon, which includes embodied carbon. So I'm really excited about Autodesk starting to embrace that in their workflows. And of course there is lots of ways to get from here to there. There's different tools on the left. And then on the right, there's Insight with the ability to export, and then extend the use of that data even further downstream.

And then just the graphic interface and this last video shows the old way on the left, and the new interface on the right. So when you open a widget and make adjustments it obscures the indirect changes to other inputs in the background, whereas here notice that adjustment changed the widget in the upper right. So some really interesting meaningful changes to the graphic and the graphs, but also more transparent in the information that's showing.

You can see at the top on the right, it shows the predictive UI and the cost all the time. Rather than on the left, the current way you have to pick one or the other. And that's what it's doing and that the left is clicking between predictive UI and cost. So a lot less clicking and hoops to jump through to access and to see the information.

That's the end of my presentation. I'm looking forward now to taking questions and talking more about implementing early energy modeling in architectural practice. Thank you very much for your attention.