|
Student Spotlight: Sam Borgeson
Student Spotlight Directory
ERG PhD student, Sam Borgeson.
|
The Campus Dashboard Project has installed a line of colored LEDs that form a real-time stacked bar graph of energy consumption in UC Berkeley's Free Speech Cafe. |
"Operational Efficiency in Buildings"
March 2010
Sam Borgeson is a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) at the University of California, Berkeley. He left his position as a founding partner at Carbon Five, a San Francisco based software consulting firm, in 2006 to pursue his passion for reducing the environmental impacts of our built environment full time. He hopes his work will improve our collective understanding of the interface between built and natural environments and is interested in developing tools, processes, and policies to support widespread resource efficiency gains in building operations.
Through their energy consumption and waste streams, buildings are major contributors to pressing environmental problems including air and water pollution, acid rain, and climate change. At the same time, many buildings are wasting resources or not using them to their full potential. This discrepancy makes buildings ideal candidates for interventions designed to conserve resources, save money, and reduce environmental impacts.
Traditional policy approaches to building efficiency rely heavily on codes and standards that specify equipment attributes or place requirements on new buildings. Such policy approaches have three important flaws that limit their impact. First, their prescriptive nature limits the degree to which they can be matched to the natural diversity of buildings, especially across patterns of use, orientation, geometry, materials, and location. Second, there are many details of implementation and maintenance that can substantially undermine the performance of prescriptive measures until they are detected and remedied. Finally, the long lifespan of buildings guarantees that it will take decades of consistent application before a significant fraction of the building stock has been touched by measures that mainly apply to new construction.
To reach climate mitigation (or energy security) goals, substantial efficiency gains must be achieved across most of the building stock. To do so, existing codes and standards will need to be augmented with performance based standards and processes and that are capable of delivering ongoing operational improvements. Analysis tools that account for the long lived and highly diverse nature of the building stock and the full spectrum of potential energy savings (i.e. whole system design, commissioning, operational changes, behavioral changes) will be required to support these innovative policies and practices. The objective of Sam's PhD work is to characterize operational energy mitigation opportunities in existing buildings well enough to develop such tools.
The problems Sam works on involve complex interactions between technologies, individuals, organizations, and policies. He decided to study at ERG because of its tradition of creative intellectual exploration and its emphasis on the study of important real world problems, often using ideas and tools from multiple disciplines. As a result of his decision, he benefits daily from interactions with a diverse community of gifted scholars working to improve the world through their lives and work.
Energy education display boards designed and installed by Nathan Brown with interactive Campus Dashboard touch screen in the lobby of Berkeley's Wurster Hall.
|
Just prior to his enrollment in the ERG PhD program, Sam conducted research under Professor Gail Brager at UC Berkeley's Center for the Built Environment on the efficacy of natural ventilation and low-energy radiant cooling strategies in California climates through case studies and parametric building simulation in Energy Plus. He has also collaborated with researchers in the Building Technologies group at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to develop stock models that simulate the effects of various building efficiency policy scenarios over time and won a campus grant that is supporting the creation of a web-based Campus Energy Dashboard through the Berkeley Institute of the Environment and the Berkeley Institute of Design that provides a user friendly interface to energy and water consumption data from campus.
Sam holds a B.A. in Physics from Wesleyan University and Master's degrees in Building Science and Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley. As a graduate student, he has received generous financial support from the Chancellor's Green Fund, California's Public Interest Energy Research Program, the Switzer Foundation, and the Alexander E. Farrell Graduate Fellowship.
[back to home]
|
