Harvard’s HouseZero opens as living lab with ambitious energy goals
An ambitious retrofit of a pre-1940s building on Harvard’s campus into a living laboratory and energy-positive prototype for ultra-efficiency has opened its doors. HouseZero is intended to address one of the biggest energy problems in the world today — inefficient existing buildings. Its design was driven by the goals of nearly zero energy for heating and cooling, zero electric lighting during the day, operating with 100 percent natural ventilation, and producing zero carbon emissions. The building is intended to produce more energy over its lifetime than was used to renovate it and throughout its subsequent operation. Leveraging the renovated building as both a workspace and a research tool, the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) will use millions of data points from hundreds of sensors to continually monitor its performance. This data will fuel research involving computational simulation, helping the center develop new systems and data-driven learning algorithms that...