Speaker Abstract: 

"Meeting cold-climate housing energy needs with solar: opportunities and challenges"

Tremendous amounts of energy---mostly in the forms of electricity and natural gas---are consumed to heat, cool, and ventilate the places in which we live and to provide the hot water, lighting, and appliance services we demand. As the amount of solar energy incident upon the envelope of a typical detached house greatly exceeds its annual energy needs, there is potential to radically reduce the adverse environmental and energy security issues caused by housing. But there are myriad challenges in realizing this ambition, arguably the greatest being a significant temporal mismatch between demand and supply. This talk will present results from a research program involving long-term experiments and simulations of seasonal thermal storage options aimed at providing the majority of cold-climate housing energy needs with solar and will outline some of the key opportunities and challenges.

Speaker Biography:

Ian Beausoleil-Morrison is a professor in the Faculty of Engineering and Design at Carleton University. He was president of the International Building Performance Simulation Association from 2010 to 2015 and is the 2021 recipient of its Distinguished Achievement Award. Over the past three decades he has researched, developed, and validated models and simulation tools for buildings and energy systems.

He recently published the textbook Fundamentals of Building Performance Simulation and has served as the Co-Editor of the Journal of Building Performance Simulation since its inception in 2008.

Over the past decade Professor Beausoleil-Morrison has been most active in exploring methods to radically reduce the dependence of housing on fossil fuels and the electrical grid through simulation and full-scale long-term experiments.