The form of clean energy neighborhoods : how it is guided and how it could be

Abstract

The subject of "clean energy city" has attained increased attention in recent year. However, almost all studies to date about "clean energy" are either at the building scale or the regional scale and little touches the real estate development scale, or in other words the neighborhood scale. The research project "Making the 'Clean Energy City' in China" - funded by Energy Foundation, China - is the first attempt to dress the relationship between neighborhood form and energy consumption. As part of the research, my thesis proposes the framework to address the energy-form relationship in in-home operational energy use, to be further developed in the future stages of the research project. The thesis poses two questions, how does neighborhood form affect in-home operational energy consumption and how do we guide designers and developers on the design of neighborhood form in order to reduce in-home operational energy consumption? The thesis approaches these questions through a review of existing energy-related simulation tools including building energy analysis tools, microclimate analysis tools and tools that address energy concerns at the neighborhood scale. The thesis proposes to use a simulation approach based on prototypes and their variations at the cluster scale - a form descriptive system developed by the research project - as the direction to establish this form-energy relationship as well as to convey this relationship to designers graphically. Finally as a demo, the thesis examines the relationship between operational energy use and neighborhood form under Prototype "Small Perimeter Block" with DeST, a building simulation tool that can also be applied to a cluster of buildings.