Towards the development of energy sharing methodology between different buildings for high efficient neighborhood design

•Innovative approach to achieve high-energy performance in retail and greenhouses.•Design optimization shows 49% improvement over the code compliant base design.•Heat sharing between individual buildings achieves further 21% site energy reduction.•Net-zero energy design has been achieved by on-site solar PV arrays.•Prototypical template for carbon neutral urban centric infrastructure is explored. Devising methods to recover waste heat and to share it within a neighborhood can lower the energy footprint of this neighborhood and reduce its dependence on the utility grids. This paper presents a novel methodology for capturing waste energy from individual buildings and sharing the recovered energy with an entire neighborhood. A survey of the current state of research on energy sharing is presented. A mixed-use neighborhood consisting of retail, residential, and greenhouse buildings is modeled to develop a holistic design of energy sharing strategy. Neighborhood-level waste heat recovery and distribution network is modeled in the EnergyPlus-DesignBuilder co-simulation platform. The energy sharing methodology is applied to different neighborhood configurations and neighborhood densities. The results show that with the application of energy sharing methodology integrated with energy efficient design and on-site solar energy, a net reduction of 74% energy in the mixed-use neighborhood is achieved compared to a design complying with the minimum requirement of the applicable energy codes. Similarly, a net 90.46% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is realized by energy sharing and on-site carbon capturing using neighborhood greenhouse.