Samuel Letellier-Duchesne

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

As the building stock is projected to double before the end of the half-century and the power grid is transitions to low-carbon resources, planning new construction hand in hand with the grid and its capacity is essential. This paper presents a method that combines urban building energy modeling and local planning of renewable energy sources (RES)...

With buildings accounting for 40% of global carbon emissions, cities striving to meet sustainability targets aligned with the Paris Agreement must retrofit their existing building stock within 30 years. Previous studies have shown that urban building energy models (UBEMs) can help cities identify technology pathways — combinations of energy efficie...

We work with policymakers in eight cities worldwide to identify technology pathways toward their near- and long-term carbon emissions reduction targets for existing buildings. Based on policymakers’ interests, we define city-specific shallow and deep retrofitting packages along with onsite photovoltaic generation potential. Without further grid dec...

Policymakers are struggling to understand what specific mixes of building retrofitting upgrades are necessary to achieve carbon emission targets. Urban building energy modelling (UBEM) is a bottom-up simulation method to develop policy measures for building stocks. However, the use of UBEM tools requires hard-to-find individuals with training in mu...

A climate resilient city, perforce, has an efficient and robust energy infrastructure that can harvest local energy resources and match energy sources and sinks that vary over space and time. This paper explores the use of an urban building energy model (UBEM) to examine the potential for creating a near-zero carbon neighbourhood in Dublin (Ireland...

Urban building energy and daylight modeling are bottom-up, physics-based approaches to simulate the thermal and daylight performance of neighborhoods and cities. The field has flourished in recent years due to a wider accessibility of urban data sets which contain the required information regarding building geometry and program. However, key buildi...

Urban Energy Modeling (UBEM) often relies on “typical” buildings, called archetypes, to represent the modeled building stock. These archetypes include basic assumptions on parameters that play a significant role on energy use, such as thermal characteristics of the building envelope and occupancy-related parameters (e.g. setpoints and internal gain...

Accurately computing the solar irradiance in building performance software (BSP) is necessary to reliably predict the thermal behavior of many building related processes as well as the performance of renewable energy generators. While most of the simulations are performed at higher resolutions, up to 1-minute, the solar radiation data is often prov...

Operational building energy has long been recognized as both a major contributor of as well as an opportunity to save carbon emissions. To do so, one may follow two paths, reduce the energy use in buildings (demand) or provide the required energy in more efficient ways (supply). In the literature, extensive research has been made on both fronts and...

Background Operational building energy has long been recognized as both a major contributor of as well as an opportunity to save carbon emissions. To do so, one may follow two paths, reduce the energy use in buildings (demand) or provide the required energy in more efficient ways (supply). In the literature, extensive research has been made on both...

The temperature level in seasonal thermal energy storage for solar communities can reach 60 °C to 80 °C if direct heating is to be provided to the buildings and a high solar fraction is desired. This is for example the case at the Drake Landing Solar Community (DLSC) in Okotoks, Alberta, Canada, which has successfully reached a solar fraction above...