Lab member, Yingli Lou, had successfully defended her PhD dissertation on “Interconnections of Energy Consumption, Carbon Emission, and Economic Impacts for Sustainable Buildings”.

SBS lab member Yingli Lou successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis titled Interconnections of Energy Consumption, Carbon Emission, and Economic Impacts for Sustainable Buildings. 

This dissertation aims to reveal the connections among building energy consumption, carbon emissions, and related economic impacts.  First, this dissertation developed individualized empirical baselines for existing buildings in the operation stage that are consistent with their modeled baselines in the design stage. Second, this dissertation developed a novel method to predict the carbon emission reduction potential of building retrofits by using dynamically changing electricity emission factors under different clean energy adoption scenarios. At last, this dissertation proposed a systematic economic evaluation method to investigate the economic impacts of carbon emission trading schemes on building retrofits.

Dr. Yingli Lou's research focuses on building energy performance evaluation, large-scale building energy simulation, and carbon emissions from buildings. During the three years of her Ph.D. study, Yingli published 9 journal papers and developed the open-source Building Energy Models for Commercial Buildings Based on CBECS Data. In addition, she has contributed to multiple grant proposals and secured more than $5M projects from DOE and NSF.

Congratulations to Dr. Lou on this well-deserved success and wish her all the best in her professional career!