Center for the Built Environment

Grocery stores are one of the most energy intensive building types, which makes targets for zero net energy (ZNE) particularly challenging. This study builds on a prior computational optimization study to identify combinations of energy conservation measures (ECMs) for an existing grocery store in San Francisco. As the climate changes, also the retrofit recommendations based on simulation results from historical-based weather files may vary. In this paper, we looked at how the optimization results change when accounting for climatechanges over the building’s service life by using future weather files. We found that the expected changes in future weather are sufficient to alter retrofit recommendations. This type of analysis is thus important to ensure that buildings designed now can continue to meet performance objectives into the future.