Financial Modeling of Building Decarbonization
Our first paper on the financial modeling of building decarbonization just got accepted by the journal Energy and Buildings, a top journal in the building technology and building energy field.
The paper, entitled “Quantifying the financial value of building decarbonization technology under uncertainty: Integrating energy modeling and investment analysis”, is led by our SUL graduate researcher Alejandro Jose Valdez Echeverria (TPP student). The team includes Carlos Cerezo Davila, the former PhD student from MIT Architecture Building Technology Group and now the Sustainable Design Lead at KPF, Juan Palacios, and Siqi Zheng.
This research project grew out of joint teaching with Carlos in the MSRED 11.350 class “sustainable real estate”. We designed a student assignment based on a real new office building in Manhattan that Carlos’s KPF team was working on, to tackle the question on whether the developer should choose the traditional gas-based heating or a fully electrification-based heating, or the third option of flexibility design. We learned a ton from Carlos and his fantastic sustainable design projects at KPF.
Alejandro further led this student assignment to a research project, and after a year we published this research paper. Now, we continue to extend our methodology to existing buildings, using multi-family buildings owned by a REITs “Veris”, and this is a joint project with Prof. Christoph Reinhart at Building Technology Group. Sanjana Paul is a key researcher in this extended project.