Simulating cool roofs with Energy3D

Fig. 1: Solar absorption of colors.

Cool roofs represent a simple solution that can save significant air-conditioning cost and help mitigate the urban heat island effect, especially in hot climates. Nobel Prize winner and former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu is a strong advocate of cool roofs. It was estimated that painting all the roofs and pavements around the world with reflective coatings would be "equivalent to getting 300 millions cars off the road!"

With Version 4.0 of Energy3D (BTW, this version supports 200+ worldwide locations -- with 150+ in the US), you can model cool roofs and evaluate how much energy you can save by switching from a dark-colored roof to a light-colored one. All you need to do is to set the colors of your roofs and other building blocks. Energy3D will automatically assign an albedo value to each building block according to the lightness of its color.

Figure 1 shows five rectangles in different gray colors (upper) and their thermal view (lower). In this thermal view, blue represents low energy absorption, red represents high energy absorption, and the colors in-between represents the energy absorption at the level in-between.

Now let's compare the thermal views of a black roof and a white roof of a cape code house, as shown in Figure 2. To produce Figure 2, the date was set to July 1st, the hottest time of the year in northern hemisphere, and the location was set to Boston.

Fig. 2: Compare dark and white roofs.

How much energy can we save if we switch from a perfectly black roof (100% absorption) to a perfectly white roof (0% absorption)? We can run the Annual Energy Analysis Tool of Energy3D to figure this out in a matter of seconds. The results are shown in Figure 3. Overall, the total yearly energy cost is cut from 6876 kWh to 6217 kWh for this small cape code house, about 10% of saving.

Figure 3 shows that the majority of savings comes from the reduction of AC cost. The reason that the color has no effect on heating in the winter is because the passive solar heat gains through the windows in this well-insulated house is enough to keep it warm during the sunshine hours. So the additional heat absorbed by the black roof in the same period doesn't offset the heating cost (it took me quite a while to figure out that this was not a bug in our code but actually the case in the simulation).

Fig. 3: Compare heating and AC costs (blue is white roof).

Of course, this result depends on other factors such as the U-value and thermal mass of the roof. In general, the better the roof is insulated, the less its color impacts the energy cost. With Energy3D, students can easily explore these design variables.

This new feature, along with others such as the heat flux visualization that we have introduced earlier, represents the increased capacity of Energy3D for performing function design using scientific simulations.

Here is a video that shows the heating effect on roofs of different colors.