Collaborative Research: Broadening Equitable, Affordable, and Health-Promoting Access to Energy Efficient Housing

Health disparities arising from inequities in the built environment, such as uneven exposure to heat risk, are exacerbated by the challenges faced in affording energy expenses. Nearly one-third (31%) of U.S. households struggle with paying energy bills and maintaining comfortable temperatures in their homes. The indoor environment plays a crucial role in shaping both physical and mental health outcomes, particularly in minority and low-income communities. The goal of this project is to develop affordable and efficient energy use strategies through simulation-based discovery, data analysis, and community engagement, and to cultivate an engineering mindset with social equity among STEM students. By investigating the impact of real-world energy usage on human health and well-being, this project addresses the societal and economic challenges associated with energy use and poverty in low-income households. Ultimately, it strives to shift from current static building control practices towards a sustainable and adaptable approach to the built environment. Despite the existence of energy assistance programs such as the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) in the U.S., there remains a persistent lack of understanding regarding the impact of controlling indoor temperatures on energy bills and health. This knowledge gap hinders the provision of cost-effective and thermally comfortable indoor environments, which have the potential to address disparities in dwelling conditions. This project aims at filling this gap by establishing a comprehensive knowledge base for balancing energy demand reduction with thermal comfort thresholds across diverse residential building conditions by utilizing parametric building energy modeling and simulation methods in combination with empirical data analytics. Additionally, community-based participatory outreach is employed to collect actual measured data from low-income residential housing, ensuring the validation of the simulation results. The research outcomes are then disseminated to underrepresented groups in STEM through a sustainable partnership between Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) and non-MSI institutions to promote the ability to situate engineering discovery within social science contexts. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.