Abstract
Off-site construction methods offer the opportunity to compress costs of net-zero energy (NZE) housing using the advantages of mass production. There has been limited investigation on trade-offs between site-built and industrialized construction from the perspective of reducing the incremental cost of NZE strategies and reducing greenhouse gas emissions during embodied and operational stages. Blokable, LLC, a vertically integrated modular builder, wanted to know how the learning curves of mass production would help them decarbonize their existing modular housing prototype at a relative cost advantage. The method developed for this question looked at the life cycle assessment of an individual apartment and used learning-curve efficiencies to approximate the relative advantage of construction-at-scale. Greenhouse gas emissions were quantified by a learning-affected, whole-life carbon emissions model and demonstrated a path to a 60% reduction of whole-life CO2-equivalent in the 2030 production year. The resultant roadmap considers a best-first approach to decarbonizing a modular building product line, and the method can be replicated for other modular builders.
Original language | American English |
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Number of pages | 89 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2021 |
NREL Publication Number
- NREL/TP-5500-81037
Keywords
- advanced building construction
- buildings
- cost
- decarbonization
- embodied carbon
- energy modeling
- industrialized construction
- life cycle assessment
- manufacturing
- modular construction
- net-zero energy
- operational carbon
- solar photovoltaics