Raghuram (Raghu) Sunnam has over 10 years of experience in simulating and commissioning various types of building energy systems for projects in Europe and the United States. His work over the years has focused on applying concepts related to information modeling and data analytics to improve energy performance of buildings. As a manager in RMI’s Carbon-Free Buildings team, Raghu leads the energy analysis portion of the Portfolio Energy Optimization (PEO) initiative. The PEO team has developed a scalable and mass-customized approach to evaluate large building portfolios to implement deep-energy retrofits. His work focuses on automating various energy modeling workflows within PEO’s framework.
Background
Prior to RMI, Raghu worked as a building performance consultant working on energy modeling, monitoring based commissioning, M&V, building envelope commissioning, energy audits, and retro-commissioning projects. He has a background in architectural engineering and has focused his work on integrating building information modeling (BIM) and building energy modeling (BEM) workflows to provide insights to project teams.
Raghu’s passion for improving the built environment evolved over time through his academic and professional experiences. He started his career as an architect and was struck by the waste resulting from construction projects in terms of energy, materials, and financial resources. He went on to shape his career to be able to address these issues through applications of BIM in the construction industry. He specifically focused his work on improving BEM workflows to minimize the time taken to build energy models through automation so project teams can focus the saved time on analytics to improve project performance. Apart from his professional commitments, Raghu has been pursuing his Phd as a part-time candidate at the Civil and Environmental Engineering department in Carnegie Mellon University. His research topic is “Formalizing the Representation of HVAC Sequence of Operations for Automated Diagnosis of Control Problems.” He hopes to use his background in BIM, BEM, and building sciences to improve the representation, implementation, and verification of advanced building controls through his work.
Education
MS, Architecture-Engineering-Construction Management, Carnegie Mellon University
B.Arch, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, India
