Advanced Building Controls for Airports

Lead Performer: National Renewable Energy Laboratory – Golden, CO
DOE Total Funding: $215,861
Project Term: June 2020 – February 2022
Funding Type: Lab Call 2020

Project Objective

As part of the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) renovations, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will initiate an effort to use advanced high-performance computing to optimize DFW building design and operations. This project will develop advanced building controls with the priority on solutions that are replicable across U.S. airports and to ensure the relevancy of research outcomes. Newly developed controls for terminals, concourses and energy systems will be piloted at DFW. Specifically, NREL will demonstrate the value of coupling an existing mobility-focusing digital twin, Athena, to a new building-operations and energy-management system, Morpheus, which consists of a commercial off-the-shelf digital twin (COTS-DT) with provided NREL enhancements.

This project will help DFW meet several key objectives of their renovation and expansion plans:

• Minimize operating costs for DFW and airlines
• Accommodate significant long-term traveler growth
• Absorb future adoption of electric vehicles
• Significantly expand the airport’s electrical supply and distribution infrastructure
• Onboard new power generation
• Improve DFW’s resilience and help address Texas’ broader energy challenges

Grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEB) are highly relevant to DFW because of the scale and broad range of building services (e.g. retail, food services, offices, industrial spaces, vehicle charging infrastructure, etc.) the airport comprises. To accommodate the corresponding electrical generation and infrastructure requirement, thermal energy and battery storage combined with energy efficiency and other forms of load shifting and load shedding are likely to offer DFW cost-effective approaches to achieving its objectives, as well as addressing Texas’s energy challenges.

Project Impact

Managing loads and generation locally can improve efficiency, reliability, and potentially also reduce costs for large entities like DFW. By deploying energy efficiency, flexible loads and energy storage following a new GEB paradigm, DFW’s renovation and new construction could help reduce infrastructure costs and increase resiliency of operations.

Contacts

DOE Technology Manager: Erika Gupta
Lead Performer: Korbaga Woldekidan, NREL