DECARB is a modular optimization tool for building-level decarbonization and energy management. Researchers at MITEI have developed this tool to support a broad range of stakeholders evaluating how buildings fit into their decarbonization and energy strategies.
Buildings are a major contributor to national and global emissions, and electrification offers an important lever to reduce them. DECARB, an open-source optimization framework, is designed to represent individual residential and single-zone commercial buildings across diverse archetypes and technology portfolios. The sector is being reshaped by the deployment of distributed energy resources—rooftop solar, batteries, heat pumps, on-site generation—and by the growing role of buildings as flexible, grid-interactive energy systems (able to shift and trade power with the grid). At the same time, electrification of heating, cooling, hot water, and transportation is reshaping patterns of building energy demand while enabling the decarbonization of these end-uses.
These changes challenge current practice for planning and operating building energy systems. Our approach focuses on a unified formulation that links long-term equipment investment, short-term operational dispatch, and building thermal dynamics under realistic tariffs, emissions constraints, and comfort requirements. New tools are needed that couple physical realism with computational tractability across multiple time scales.
DECARB is a least-cost optimization model that determines the cost-optimal portfolio of distributed energy technologies—boilers, furnaces, and cogeneration units (combined heat and power), heat pumps and AC units, absorption chillers (heat-driven cooling), water heaters, solar PV, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles—together with their operational schedules, so that a building's electrical and thermal needs are met at minimum cost. The model simultaneously respects equipment capacity and investment limits, building thermal balance and comfort requirements, hot water and EV service needs, time-varying tariffs, peak-demand charges, and carbon accounting.
DECARB was developed by researchers at the MIT Energy Initiative.