Boston, MIT, May 10, 2011 - Researchers at MIT, in collaboration with colleagues at China's Tsinghua University, have created a new set of tools that can evaluate the energy performance of real estate projects while they are still in the process of design.

The tools are intended to help shape the process of urbanization at the scale at which cities are actually built - one neighborhood at a time - producing cleaner energy patterns than would otherwise be possible.

The tools include a pattern book for neighborhood forms that have proven to be energy efficient and an Energy Proforma@ that represents the energy value of a neighborhood form with a single number.

By providing a common measure for assessing clean energy projects, the tools will contribute to the creation of public policy in China and will hopefully produce a model for assessing clean energy urban form that will become common practice for development worldwide.

Led at MIT by Dennis Frenchman and Christopher Zegras, the research is a response to the breakneck economic growth in China over the last thirty years, growth that has dramatically changed the Chinese urban landscape through rapid urban expansion, housing development and massive new infrastructure projects, leading their cities to consume ever more energy.

(More than 46% of China's total energy consumption can be attributed to the built environment and the life of people within it, a proportion that continues to increase.)

While previous research has illustrated the problem, this research seeks to help developers choose among a vast array of variables to design more efficient scenarios in particular circumstances; to help them assess the energy consumption for a specific project while in the process of design; and to do this in a way that is easily compared to other projects, to provide a basis for energy policy about the built environment.

The project focused on the city of Jinan as a test case. Studies were undertaken of the four principal neighborhood forms that have been used to develop the city - forms that reflect successive national policies toward urbanization - by assessing energy consumption in three key areas: transportation and mobility, operational energy and embedded energy.

For transportation and mobility, the question was how neighborhood form affects the amount and type of transportation used. For operational energy, how much energy is required for heating, cooling and lighting, etc.

And for embedded energy, how much energy is consumed in the construction and life cycle of the buildings and site. A key finding is that the type of urban form does significantly affect energy consumption; the studies help to understand why and by how much in Jinan.

In a parallel survey of efforts worldwide, the research identified six examples of clean energy urban form and distilled the prototypes into a pattern book that provides examples for designers, and a database for comparing the energy performance of different design approaches.

The intention is that these prototypes, along with new ones, will replace existing typologies that evolved with no consideration of energy consumption.

The other main product of the research is the Energy Proforma, similar to the financial pro forma commonly used in real estate development. The financial pro forma collapses a wide array of factors such as market demand, construction systems, costs and effects over time into a single number that represents the rate of return on a project.

Likewise, the Energy Proforma collapses the transport, operational and embodied energy use of a neighborhood form - along with its potential for energy production over time - into a single number representing its net present energy value.

The tools were put to use for the first time this past summer in the MIT-Tsinghua Joint Urban Design studio in Jinan, led by Frenchman and Jan Wampler. Five teams of graduate students from MIT and Tsinghua University in Beijing used the tools to develop proposals for new Clean Energy Neighborhoods in a town being planned on the new high-speed rail line from Beijing to Shanghai. (Jinan is the only stop).

The results were successful not only in terms of energy efficiency -- surpassing some of the international models -- but also in terms of urban design quality and livability, indicating that these two goals are mutually reinforcing: good urban design equates to lower energy consumption.

The ultimate challenge for China is to craft an energy policy that does not specify an ideal model of development, for two principal reasons. First, energy performance at the neighborhood scale is affected by an enormous number of variables and efficiency may be achieved through different strategies.

And second, simplistic regulations in the Chinese model of top-down planning can lead to highly standardized, repetitive neighborhood design in which the minimum requirement becomes the dominant rationale for form, as with the rigidly aligned slab neighborhoods found across the country.

In such cases the minimum standards can overwhelm considerations of livability, as well as innovation in housing and neighborhood design, since the most expedient (or only) route to approval is to construct the standard form. A successful energy policy must encourage clean energy neighborhoods that are - equally importantly - good places to live.