Building industry reporting and design for sustainability (BIRDS) neutral environment software tool (NEST) technical manual

Abstract

Building stakeholders need practical metrics, data, and tools to support decisions related to sustainable building designs, technologies, standards, and codes. The Engineering Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has addressed this high priority national need by extending its metrics and tools for sustainable building products, known as Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES), to whole-buildings through its Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) framework. The BIRDS framework is a sustainability measurement system consisting of whole-building sustainability metrics that are based on innovative extensions to life-cycle assessment (LCA) and life-cycle costing (LCC) approaches involving whole-building energy simulations. The measurement system evaluates the sustainability of both the materials and the energy used by a building over time. It assesses the "carbon footprint" of buildings as well as 11 other environmental performance metrics, and integrates economic performance metrics to yield science-based measures of the business case for investment choices in high-performance green buildings.The BIRDS framework has been leveraged to assist building architects and designers to evaluate the sustainability performance of custom building designs through the development of BIRDS NEST ("Neutral Environment Software Tool"), an application programming interface (API) that allows other software tools to submit building characteristics and performance information (in a standardized format) to develop sustainability performance metrics for a customized building design.The beta version of BIRDS NEST is focused on performing a life-cycle environmental impact assessment (LCIA) based on 12 impact categories for single-family residential buildings. The BIRDS NEST has been designed to interact with NREL's OpenStudio (OS), an open-source, cross-platform collection of software tools that supports whole building energy modeling using EnergyPlus. In collaboration with NREL's OS Team, an OS "Measure" has been developed to successfully send and receive information to and from BIRDS NEST, allowing OS users to develop LCIA estimates for OS building models without leaving the OS application.This technical manual describes BIRDS and its LCA and LCIA methodology and data, development of BIRDS NEST and the associated OS Measure, and BIRDS NEST's limitations, planned release, and the development of its future capabilities. Keywordslife-cycle assessment; life-cycle impact assessment; energy efficiency; residential buildings; lowenergy buildings; net-zero energy performance; sustainability; software ii This publication is available free of charge from: https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST. TN.1976 iii This publication is available free of charge from: https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST. TN.1976 Preface This documentation was developed by the Applied Economics Office (AEO) in the Engineering Laboratory (EL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIS...