Latest news with #ORNL
USA Today
07-07-2025
- Business
- USA Today
Modeling buildings' energy use could help lower electric bills
DOE's goal is to cut electricity use in US buildings by 30% in 20 years Suppose you meet with an architect and ask her to design a building. You tell her the design you'd like, the size, and where it will be located. You might also specify the level of energy efficiency you want – known as the energy use intensity – that is up to or better than code values. Although the architect traditionally would complete the early design and other phases before addressing limitations on energy use, this goal can now be performed in real time using artificial intelligence software trained on building energy simulations developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. This technology, described by ORNL's Joshua New in a talk to Friends of ORNL, reduces the cost for the architectural firm. In addition, it ensures you get a properly designed building that will allow you to reliably pay for the building, mortgage, appliances and energy bills. ORNL has also developed a database of every existing U.S. building – more than 125 million – and made the data and building energy models freely available via the 'Model America' dataset. That was one topic in New's talk to FORNL titled, 'An energy model of every U.S. building: Science and business uses.' 'This dataset leveraged the AutoBEM software to enable creation of a computer model, or digital twin, of every U.S. building as a baseline before establishing cost-effective retrofit improvements for individual buildings, but at the scale of the entire country,' New explained. 'So, whether someone is constructing a new building or already has one, these capabilities can help improve the building's performance.' A digital twin is a virtual copy of a real-world object that accurately reflects its physical counterpart. It could show you in this make-believe scenario how to optimize the energy performance of your house at a reasonable cost through the simulated incorporation of certain energy technologies and other features. The digital twin can be updated with improved data via real-time input on a webpage or by ingesting portfolios of building characteristics or energy use from partner data. According to New, these simulations involve physics-based energy performance of various roof types, oil and gas furnaces, electric or gas water heaters, different types of lighting, windows of different sizes and insulating value, attic insulation and building materials of varying thermal mass. The digital twin has access to data on costs, the average weather in the area where you'll live and the rates the local utilities charge over time. This advanced technology for determining how to optimize the energy performance of residential and commercial buildings, reducing their energy use and electrical bills, arose out of a successful project that was launched by an ORNL team in 2015. New, the team leader who has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Tennessee, worked for 15 years at DOE's Building Technologies Research and Integration Center at ORNL. In 2024, he received the international R&D 100 'Researcher of the Year' award. The team's task was to create, partially for DOE's Building Technologies Office, a computer model of nearly every building in 2020 in the United States and their individual hourly energy use. DOE's long-term goal has been to use the building data collected and building energy modeling software to determine ways to reduce electricity use by U.S. buildings by 30% in 20 years, New said. 'Our immediate goal in making data from 125.7 million buildings publicly available in 2021 was to help encourage more energy-efficient, resilient construction of new buildings and retrofits of existing buildings to reduce energy costs,' New said. 'More than 125 million residential and commercial buildings in the United States account for 40% of primary energy use and 73% of electricity use on the nation's grid and 80% during peak demand,' he added. 'The total energy cost of operating U.S. buildings is $370 billion per year.' The mammoth effort by the ORNL team started with the creation of 122 million building models by mining satellite, aerial and Google street-view images; employing light detection and ranging (LIDAR) technology; and stereoscopic vision from imaging data captured by drones and airplanes to scan large volumes and rapidly collect precise three-dimensional data; using multiple listing services and developing databases for buildings that consolidate digital information on the unique footprint, height, age of construction and other properties necessary to create an accurate building energy model for each structure in an open-source tool. To determine which combination of energy technology options and other features would optimize each building's energy efficiency and minimize its energy cost, at least eight supercomputers in the United States, including Titan at ORNL and Theta at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory, were used. The speed of the computations using computer vision and other algorithms was greatly boosted by advances in artificial intelligence. 'The physics simulations using the EnergyPlus building energy model take 20 seconds to five minutes, depending on the complexity of the building,' he said. 'But AI can do the calculations in milliseconds, sometimes microseconds, enabling real-time feedback.' What are the practical applications of building energy models and data? 'Our capabilities, built on top of DOE's EnergyPlus and OpenStudio software, are being used by architecture-engineer-construction firms like SmithGroup to improve energy awareness during early design,' New said. 'It's being used by utilities, like Chattanooga's Electric Power Board (EPB), to make operational decisions on their electrical distribution network. It's used by Lightbox, which services 54,000 commercial real estate lenders. And we have been working with Google to improve their tools for estimating the energy impacts of buildings in 40,000 cities worldwide.' In the past five years, New has been working with key partners in several multibillion-dollar industries to enhance the data and models for practical uses in actionable business decisions. A simulation-informed analysis estimates that use of DOE-funded building energy models could bring large savings (estimated below) to several major industries and governmental organizations. They include: New spoke about his team's partnership with the AEC firm SmithGroup. 'My understanding is there are about 20 architects that use this prototype tool to provide energy-informed building designs,' he said. New showed the audience an estimate of the energy use intensity target at the top left corner of the interactive tool while architects were changing the building properties. In designing the building, the architect pulls levers and turns knobs to construct new virtual 3D buildings, each with different sets of energy options. 'Every time an architect makes a change, they see energy use moving closer or further away from the energy target and by how much,' New said. 'The energy use can be displayed among a list of all potential building designs, informing how energy use of an original design can often be cut in half just by changing a few energy technology options in the early design phase.' New's team has collaborated with EPB (Electric Power Board) on using the building energy model to help the Chattanooga electric utility keep down its costs to consumers. He said EPB knows where its critically loaded infrastructure is and that it can potentially reduce expenses if it can defer installing a higher-capacity line, new transformers or a new substation. 'Instead, they have the option of reducing electrical load in that area,' New said. 'If the utility can defer that infrastructure upgrade through improved building efficiency and smart thermostats, EPB will operate more efficiently and not have to raise its rates.' New said his team modeled the energy use of more than 175,000 residential and commercial buildings served by EPB to determine which ones needed to be altered to greatly improve their energy efficiency. The team estimated the savings from upgrading buildings constructed last century to 2012 building codes; EPB then helped homeowners increase their insulation levels to bring their houses up to code. The resulting annual savings ranged from $11 million to $35 million, varying by building type, vintage and strategy used. New's team recommended other changes to EPB that allowed them to identify $375 per customer as a break-even point for deploying smart thermostats in the homes of customers that could respond to a utility signal. Such demand response measures enable utilities to use buildings as thermal batteries, reduce their electricity usage during peak demand periods or shift their energy consumption to times when it is less expensive or more plentiful, preventing utility blackouts. New said that in part, because of this collaboration, when the Tennessee Valley Authority boosted its electricity prices, most local power companies buying electrical power from TVA had to raise their rates, 'but EPB kept their rate completely flat. That was a huge success story!'
Yahoo
02-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Simulating floods is the topic at Friends of ORNL talk on July 8
Violent storms like Hurricane Helene last fall have made Americans aware of how devastasting flooding on rivers and streams can be and how beneficial accurate predictions of where and when flooding will occur would be. Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are working on improving the accuracy of flood predictions using physics-based computer models of the ever-changing nature of a flood and the factors influencing its progression and effects. The researchers have achieved promising results, thanks to the lab's powerful high-performance computers, which include Frontier, the world's second fastest supercomputer. Large computational requirements can limit the application of physics-based simulation of flood hydrodynamics, particularly for large-scale and long-duration flood events, but ORNL's computing power has enabled researchers to overcome those limitations. At its July luncheon lecture, Friends of ORNL will hear from Shih-Chieh Kao, group leader of the Water Resource Science and Engineering Group in the Environmental Sciences Division at ORNL and the program manager of the ORNL Water Power Program, regarding ORNL's efforts to scale up flood modeling using the lab's state-of-the art computers. Kao will speak on 'Advancing Capabilities for Hydrodynamic Modeling of Flooding – How Far Can We Go?' at noon Tuesday, July 8, at the UT Resource Center, 1201 Oak Ridge Turn-pike. Before the free presentation starts, sandwiches, chips, cookies and drinks will be available at 11:15 a.m. at the UT Resource Center for a donation of $10 on a first-come, first-served basis. To view the virtual presentation, click on the talk title on the website homepage and then click on the Zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture. You can view it the next day by clicking on 'Past Talks' on the website's navigation bar. Kao will tell how the ORNL team has scaled up and accelerated the processing of TRITON (Two-dimensional Runoff Inundation Toolkit for Operational Needs), an open-source, physics-based hydrodynamic model based on shallow-water equations, by running it on high-performance computers equipped with graphics processing units. GPUs, which were first used for video games, provide the necessary power for complex calculations, and they are used in the Frontier supercomputer, as well as its predecessor, Summit. TRITON was run on ORNL's supercomputers to simulate massive widespread flooding in spring 2019 in the Missouri River Basin, the largest river basin in the United States, covering all or portions of 10 states, or a total of 529,000 square miles. The huge floods caused billions of dollars' worth of damage to both infrastructure (such as buildings, roads, and bridges) and agriculture (such as damage to food crops and grain that was unshipped because of disruptions in river barge traffic). 'Results demonstrate that, by harnessing GPU-equipped computing systems, large-scale, multi-day flood events can be simulated by hydrodynamic models within a few hours,' Kao said. 'This work lays the foundation for future advancements in flood modeling, enabling more effective flood risk management and mitigation strategies.' Examples of flood risk management and mitigation strategies include restrictions on developments in floodplains, flash flood warnings, dams and levees, flood-proofed buildings, installation of basement sump pumps and the relocation of people living on the floodplain. A distinguished researcher at ORNL, Kao oversees various research projects supported by the Department of Energy's Water Power Technologies Office. He holds three degrees in civil engineering – B.S. and M.S. degrees from National Taiwan University and a Ph.D. from Purdue University. Since 2011, he has led a national assessment on the effects of climate change on the national production of power by hydroelectric dams. He also contributed to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study on modernizing estimates of probable maximum precipitation in a changing climate. In 2023, he was named a fellow of the Environmental & Water Resources Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He has served as a frequent reviewer for more than 20 scientific and engineering journals. He has received several distinguished awards, including an outstanding reviewer award, a best dissertation award and two best paper awards. This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Simulating floods is the topic at Friends of ORNL talk on July 8
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
IT Lab Partners honored by Oak Ridge National Lab
Oak Ridge National Laboratory has named IT Lab Partners LLC (ITLP) the recipient of its 2024 Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business of the Year Award in recognition of outstanding work as a small business contractor. ITLP is a joint venture comprised of Information Technology Resources Inc., Cadre5 LLC, and XCEL Engineering Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of MartinFederal Consulting LLC. Since its inception in 2021, ITLP has placed more than 200 highly skilled professionals at ORNL in support of its Information Technology Basic Ordering Agreement, according to a news release. 'From the outset, ITLP was instrumental in helping me make critical hires that broadened our capabilities to include User Experience research, product strategy, User Interface design, accessibility, prototyping, and front-end development,' said Brooks Herring, Head of User Experience for ORNL's Information Technology Services Directorate. 'As project demands increased, ITLP provided top-tier contract staff to complement our existing UT-Battelle team, allowing us to efficiently stand-up multiple work streams. Their ability to identify and place skilled UX practitioners has significantly elevated the quality, velocity, and overall impact of our work. ITLP has been a critical asset in our journey to building a world-class UX practice.' 'We are thrilled for our dynamic team to be recognized by ORNL leadership,' said Tim Campbell, general manager of ITLP and CEO of ITR. 'It is an honor to support the incredibly important work being done in Oak Ridge and to play a role in the Lab's continued success.' This article originally appeared on Oakridger: IT Lab Partners honored by Oak Ridge National Lab
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
US scientists simulate how tens of thousands of electrons move in materials in real time
Scientists have developed a simulation that can predict how tens of thousands of electrons move in materials in real time, or natural time rather than compute by a team from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in collaboration with North Carolina State University, the model combines ORNL's expertise in time-dependent quantum methods with NCSU's advanced quantum simulation revealed that the latest effort is vital in designing new technologies such as advanced photovoltaic cells and emerging information systems. They underlined that by directly observing thousands of electrons in real-time, scientists gain powerful insights into how materials respond at the quantum in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, the team developed a real-time, time-dependent density functional theory, or RT-TDDFT, capability within the open-source Real-space Multigrid, or RMG, code to model systems of up to 24,000 is a quantum mechanical method that allows researchers to simulate how electrons move and interact in materials over time, once they are excited by an external stimulus. It works by calculating how the electron density in materials changes in response to the application of electric and electromagnetic fields (i.e. light), for instance. Researchers highlighted that the real-time, time-dependent describes the real-time evolution of the wavefunction or quantum-mechanical property. 24,000 electrons is about the same size as treating 4,000 carbon atoms or 2,400 water molecules treating the time evolution of all their electrons. "Think of it like watching a slow-motion replay of all the electrons in a tiny piece of metal responding to a flash of light, but at an incredibly detailed, quantum level," said ORNL's Jacek Jakowski."Our calculations are so large that they require one of the world's fastest supercomputers to run them in 'real time'. By capturing these electron movements at scale, we can predict how new materials will behave, potentially leading to more efficient photovoltaic cells, faster computers, and better quantum technologies." The study revealed that their method offers insights into nonequilibrium dynamics and excited states across a diverse range of systems, from small organic molecules to large metallic nanoparticles. Benchmarking results demonstrate excellent agreement with established TDDFT implementations and showcase the superior stability of our time integration algorithm, enabling long-term simulations with minimal energy drift. Researchers also highlighted that metallic nanoparticles, or metals with dimensions within 1-100 nanometers, have unique optical properties caused by the way thousands of electrons within these metals interact with incoming light. It's critical for researchers to understand the ways these electrons move under a range of conditions to advance these new technologies. The challenge in moving these technologies forward has been capturing these ultrafast electron dynamics in realistic nanoscale materials, or materials where at least one dimension is on the scale of nanometers, according to a press release. The study underlined that the achievement enables the design of novel materials with tunable optical, electronic and magnetic properties and opens the door to new innovations in optical and quantum information devices. "These developments hold great promise for creating novel devices with tailored electronic, optical and magnetic properties," said Professor Bernholc. "Ultimately, we hope our real-time approach will guide experimental efforts and accelerate breakthroughs in areas ranging from spintronics to quantum information science." Next steps for the project include simulating even more complex scenarios to discover new physics in quantum systems and enhancing efficiency and accuracy to handle larger, more intricate simulations, as per the release.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
‘A county of stories' Anderson County's rich history revealed through archival records
CLINTON, Tenn. (WATE) — Anderson County is among the oldest counties in East Tennessee, with a rich history that has made a footprint across the world. In the hallways of Clinton's courthouse, Anderson County records archivist Zach Foster holds the keys to the rich history of where he grew up. If you need to know something about your family in Anderson County, Foster has you covered. 'I did have someone from California once reach out to me, needing to see her ancestor's will from right around the turn of the century. And we actually had it, which was fantastic,' said Foster. Foster can tell you all about Anderson County's roots too. It was initially Cherokee land, and was later claimed by people coming over from Virginia in the late 1700's. Emory Valley Center continues to serve disabled community in Anderson County 'The three biggest things for Anderson County: agriculture when we were first founded, that moved into pearling of all things in the 1890s, and, of course, that moved into coal industry,' said Foster. That's right, finding pearls along the Clinch River was rather lucrative. 'The pearling industry was so big because we had people come as far away as Chicago, they would get off on Market Street. That is where the actual merchants would come and buy pearls up from the local guys like crazy. Some of the pearls made it as far as Paris, France to be showcased for how fantastic they were,' said Foster. The county's history can be found throughout the area, including at the David Hall Cabin, which sits just outside of town. It was built in 1799. 'Well, it was built on Emory Road. So, all the pioneers and gunslingers would go right in front of it, so I supposed it was quite popular,' said Libby Bumgardner. The cabin has been in Bumgardner's family for generations, with documents and artifacts dating back to the Civil War found inside. 'When we got in it and found all those receipts and letters it just told a story, told a history. And I had to save it,' said Bumgardner. ORNL innovation leading the way for over 80 years Between Bumgardner and Foster, the rich history of Anderson County is not hard to find. 'There's countless stories in Anderson County, we're a county of stories. And I guess I'm kind of the steward of that, which is a huge honor,' said Foster. Foster jokes he is related to everyone in Anderson County, but has time to learn everyone's names, eventually. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
