Decarbonization During Predevelopment of Modular Building Solutions
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.
- Research Organization:
- National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- Wells Fargo Foundation Innovation Incubator (IN2) Program; USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC36-08GO28308
- OSTI ID:
- 1837021
- Report Number(s):
- NREL/TP-5500-81037; MainId:79813; UUID:f2a63b40-c2e3-451b-9f11-112574fa79c0; MainAdminID:63450
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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