I had a conversation yesterday with as Program Manager from Autodesk who was looking into implementing workflows utilizing Autodesk Products to produce energy analysis for existing buildings. He had seen one of our many fantastic videos for PKNail, okay we have two homegrown videos, but our effort in capturing the built environment dovetails nicely with this effort. And while I have commented many times on the sustainable retrofit market I had not seen a number placed on it but Autodesk posted a number on their web site. If you are not intending to make the jump you can read some of their conclusions below.
Buildings are key to achieving climate stabilization, representing roughly 40% of global energy consumption and 25% of global carbon emissions. In addition, energy efficiency retrofits represent a massive latent market, projected to reach an estimated worth of $400 billion by 2030 in the U.S. alone. To respond to these twin environmental and market demands at scale and speed, the building industry needs to respond quickly and cost-effectively.
Our research suggests that rapid energy modeling enables building energy assessments with a smaller budget and shorter time frame, and can thereby help increase the number of existing buildings that undergo assessment and energy upgrades. We expect property owners and managers, home buyers, tenants and landlords, designers and architects, auditors, and energy consultants to benefit from such a workflow.
Included in this effort is Revit CEA (Conceptual Energy Analysis) that allows the user, after putting parameters in place, to use a cloud computing enironment, that is send it out for computation, to perform the calculations using Green Building Studio as the back end but making it transparent to the user. What I like about this effort is that I am not required to fire up or even know Green Building Studio to do the energy analysis, the export and data exchange, done in gbXML is done seemlessly and I get the report.
But back to the original premise which is getting existing buildings into a format that you can perform this and Autodesk has developed a workflow to help, and while this is excellent I would also argue for PKNail’s place in the workflow as measuring and building in the environment you are going to model and analyze reduces a couple of steps and amount of software you need to know. I don’t argue it should be the only tool just that it deserves a place on the shelf.