“Before the 1996 Olympics, campus began to modernize its energy systems, including installing meters measuring electricity, chilled water usage, and steam usage,” said Mavris, Distinguished Regents’ Professor and Boeing Professor of Advanced Aerospace Systems Analysis. “New buildings that came online later were further outfitted to collect data on their utility performance. The problem was, however, that the use of this data was very siloed. Planning and strategic-level decisions were not accounting for campus-wide energy interactions across all buildings.”
That prompted ASDL to create a digital twin of the entire campus. It compared buildings and, over time, showed when they would start to overconsume energy or use chilled water inefficiently. A related dashboard revealed which buildings weren’t adjusting energy use at night, when students, staff, and faculty had gone home.
“Campus managers got a better sense of when our utility bills were too high or low,” Mavris said. “Our digital twin has helped campus lower costs, improve reliability, and make more strategic decisions.”
During the 2020 pandemic, digital twinning played an important role in the Living Building certification process for The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, one of the world’s greenest buildings. The Kendeda Fund offered Tech a bonus if it could achieve certification within the first 12 months of operation. But in the fourth month, campus shut down, drastically changing the building’s occupancy.
Nevertheless, a digital twin of the building was able to confirm that the building would easily have been net-positive for energy and water, key requirements for certification.
