91°µÍø’s software suite AutoBEM is being used in the architecture, city planning, real estate and home efficiency industries. Users take advantage of the suite’s energy modeling of almost all U.S. buildings. Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
ORNL researchers created a digital model of the energy use of almost every building in America, called the Model America dataset. This data, which was gathered by the ORNL-developed Automatic Building Energy Modeling (AutoBEM) software suite, is now being used by dozens of companies in industries from building design to city planning and real estate risk assessment.
The tool was developed using high-performance computing to process layers of imaging and other data to create a model of individual buildings. AutoBEM can illuminate how changes to building size, construction materials, heating and cooling technologies, and other factors will affect building energy use, energy costs, and emissions – both minute-by-minute and in the future as climate changes. The scope of the data allows evaluations at the building level up to the scale of cities, utility service areas, or the entire nation. The impact of this work is expanding exponentially as many commercial partners publicly share their related data.
The AutoBEM software suite:
- Simulated energy models for over 140 million U.S. buildings
- Can run an annual simulation of over 1 million energy models in an hour
- Data shared with over 60 organizations
- Example: Google is using AutoBEM data to train AI for estimating carbon footprints of buildings in 40,000 cities