Getting to zero – Experiences of designing and monitoring a zero-energy-building: The Science House in Minnesota

Jason Steinbock, Tom McDougall, Jeff Weier, and David Eijadi, The Weidt Group

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Abstract

The challenge of the Science House at the Science Museum of Minnesota was to create habitable, cold climate architecture that would result in a zero net energy building. The team used science to exert an authoritative influence to resolve design conflicts--at the intersections of functionality, aesthetics and performance. The team needed to significantly reduce annual energy consumption beginning with expectations of use and architectural form. Ultimately, renewable generation would be needed. The defining question became "how much building and power generation can we build with the given budget?" The resulting building utilizes passive solar design, daylighting, ground source heat pumps and photovoltaic (PV) panels as the major design strategies.

This poster documents the predicted energy use and actual monitored performance. It shows the extent of load reduction achieved with passive solar design. A challenge for getting to 'real zero' is the difference between expected performance and actual building performance. This poster illustrates how measured data is used to trace the causes to unexpected equipment performance, heat pump behaviour and off-line PV panels. Assumptions regarding occupancy and building use during the design phase often differ from their actual use; this makes operating a building for zero energy an additional challenge above and beyond designing one. Overall, the actual building is exceeding the design team's goals, using on average 59 kWh/m 2 annually and generating 80 kWh/m 2 to exceed even the zero net energy goals.