Measuring Carbon Impact with PlanIT Impact

Can you calculate carbon impact in PlanIT Impact? 

Users can leverage the energy use results and free tools from the EPA to calculate carbon impact from energy saving design measures.

Keep reading to see how it’s done.

Calculate the Energy Savings for your Proposed Design

To use the EPA calculator, you need to know the amount of energy saved from your proposed design versus a baseline design.  For new construction, the baseline is typically modeled as a building designed to code minimum.  For a building retrofit, the baseline is the existing building’s energy use.

Each scenario in the Energy Module has results broken down by total gas and electricity use, which are used to calculate the savings.

Savings = Baseline – Proposed

You can use this spreadsheet to calculate savings from your analyses in PlanIT Impact. Energy-Saving-Calculator.xlsx (395 downloads)

Input Energy Savings into the EPA Calculator 

With the savings calculated from the results from PlanIT Impact, input the amount and the unit into the calculator below.

Example

For a 54,000 sq.ft. existing office building, PlanIT Impact was used to benchmark the existing building energy use and compare it to the expected energy use of the Proposed energy saving strategies.

Using the baseline and proposed energy results, the savings were calculated for gas and electricity.

Finally, the EPA calculator was used to calculate the avoided GHG emission equivalencies.

That’s it! For questions or assistance, comment below or reach out to info@planitimpact.com