Achieving building sustainability through innovation

Achieving sustainability in the increasingly complex and cost-constrained working environment requires a greater knowledge of related environmental impacts and their associated costs, related uncertainties, and achievable benchmarks for demonstrating improved performance across the whole range of building types and occupancies. ASHRAE plans to achieve sustainability by integrating building sustainability principles, effective practices, and emerging concepts into all of its appropriate standards. HVACR designers should take advantage of a building's inherent thermal massing effect, and to do this, one must accurately predict transient cooling and heating building requirements and total building energy consumption using inverse models that are trained through better use of on-site data. The designers should also improve the selection of building materials, reduce harmful emissions, and predict annual energy consumption with greater accuracy to achieve lower building energy usage.