Retrofitting District-Scale Buildings to Cut Energy Use By 50%: A Case Study

Buildings in cities consume 30 to 70% of the cities’ total primary energy. Retrofitting the existing building stock to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy use is necessary to reduce green-house-gas emissions and mitigate climate change. We present a case study on district-scale energy retrofit analysis using CityBES, a web-based toolkit developed by LBNL. Two retrofit scenarios are studied: evaluating energy savings and cost of typical energy conservation measures (ECMs) for a portfolio of hundreds of buildings in downtown San Francisco; and optimizing a package of ECMs that can achieve 50% energy savings for all buildings in the district.