Gregor P. Henze

About

Gregor P. Henze is a Professor in Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. He holds the Charles Victor Schelke Endowed Chair and is a RASEI Fellow. His educational background includes a PhD in Civil Engineering (Building Systems) from the University of Colorado Boulder, an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Oregon State University, and a Dipl.-Ing. in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Berlin. His research focuses on building energy systems, including building-to-grid integration, model-based predictive control, fault detection and diagnosis, occupancy detection, and low-exergy building energy systems for continental climates. He is involved in developing design and control strategies for mixed-mode buildings that incorporate natural and mechanical ventilation, as well as time series prediction and distributed generation systems. Henze has received numerous honors and distinctions, including fellowships from ASHRAE and IBPSA, a Fulbright Distinguished Chair, and various awards for teaching, research, and service. His professional affiliations include the International Building Performance Simulation Association and ASHRAE.

Research topics

• Engineering
• Economics
• Environmental economics
• Business
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Architectural engineering
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Environmental science
• Natural resource economics

Selected publications

• Ten questions concerning energy flexibility in buildings

  Building and Environment · 2022 · 143 citations

  Demand side energy flexibility is increasingly being viewed as an essential enabler for the swift transition to a low-carbon energy system that displaces conventional fossil fuels with renewable energy sources while maintaining, if not improving, the operation of the energy system. Building energy flexibility may address several challenges facing energy systems and electricity consumers as society transitions to a low-carbon energy system characterized by distributed and intermittent energy reso…

  DOI

• The effect of price-based demand response on carbon emissions in European electricity markets: The importance of adequate carbon prices

  Applied Energy · 2021 · 127 citations

  Price-based demand response (PBDR) has recently been attributed great economic but also environmental potential. However, the determination of its short-term effects on carbon emissions requires the knowledge of marginal emission factors (MEFs), which compared to grid mix emission factors (XEFs), are cumbersome to calculate due to the complex characteristics of national electricity markets. This study, therefore, proposes two merit order-based methods to approximate hourly MEFs and applies them…

  DOI

• Ten questions concerning reinforcement learning for building energy management

  Building and Environment · 2023 · 106 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reinforcement learning building control approach harnessing imitation learning

  Energy and AI · 2023-03-14 · 52 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown significant success in sequential decision making in fields like autonomous vehicles, robotics, marketing and gaming industries. This success has attracted the attention to the RL control approach for building energy systems which are becoming complicated due to the need to optimize for multiple, potentially conflicting, goals like occupant comfort, energy use and grid interactivity. However, for real world applications, RL has several drawbacks like requiri…

  PublisherDOI

• Lessons learned from field demonstrations of model predictive control and reinforcement learning for residential and commercial HVAC: A review

  Applied Energy · 2025-07-18 · 26 citations

  review
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Margarite Jacoby

  University of Colorado Boulder

  72 shared

• Sin Yong Tan

  Iowa State University

  65 shared

• Soumik Sarkar

  Iowa State University

  48 shared

• Anthony Florita

  27 shared

• Soumik Sarkar

  25 shared

• Gregory S. Pavlak

  19 shared

• Sourav Dey

  University of Colorado Boulder

  18 shared

• Amy Allen

  University of Colorado Boulder

  16 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Civil Engineering (Building Systems)

  University of Colorado Boulder

  1995

• M.S., Mechanical Engineering

  Oregon State University

  1991

• Other, mechanical engineering

  Technical University of Berlin

  1992

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and…
• Fellow of the International Building Performance Simulation…
• Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Science, Technology, and In…
• RASEI Associate Director for Energy Systems for the Built En…
• Charles Victor Schelke Endowed Chair 2017

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• Matthew R. Hallowellh-49
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