SIMULATION-BASED WEATHER NORMALIZATION APPROACH TO STUDY THE IMPACT OF WEATHER ON ENERGY USE OF BUILDINGS IN THE U.S.

Weather normalization is a crucial step in building energy rating and retrofit measurements. Accounting for the impacts of weather on energy use of commercial buildings is a rigorous challenge because of the complexity and diversity in the operation, the mechanical systems, and the use-types available. This paper documents preliminary results of an effort to determine a set of weather adjustment coefficients that can be used to isolate the impacts of weather on energy use of buildings in 1020 weather location sites available in the U.S. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) commercial reference building models are adopted as hypothetical models with standard operations to deliver consistency in modeling. The correlation between building envelope design, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system design and properties for different building types and the change in heating and cooling energy consumption caused by variations in weather is examined.

[1]  Margaret F. Fels.  PRISM: An Introduction , 1986 .

[2]  Refrigerating.  2001 ASHRAE handbook : fundamentals , 2001 .

[3]  William Chung,et al.  Benchmarking the energy efficiency of commercial buildings , 2006 .

[4]  C Christian Struck,et al.  On selecting weather data sets to estimate a building design's robustness to climate variations , 2009 .

[5]  David E. Claridge,et al.  Inverse Modeling Toolkit: Numerical Algorithms for Best-Fit Variable-Base Degree Day and Change Point Models , 2003 .

[6]  Kelly Kissock,et al.  Measuring Progress with Normalized Energy Intensity , 2011 .

[7]  Paul Fazio,et al.  Development of an energy rating system for existing houses , 1999 .

[8]  Joseph H. Eto,et al.  On using degree-days to account for the effects of weather on annual energy use in office buildings , 1988 .

[9]  Kim Bjarne Wittchen,et al.  Implementing the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) , 2013 .

[10]  Jan Akander,et al.  Energy normalization techniques , 2004 .

[11]  Bing Liu,et al.  U.S. Department of Energy Commercial Reference Building Models of the National Building Stock , 2011 .

[12]  D. van Dijk,et al.  More information on the set of CEN standards for the EPBD , 2008 .

[13]  Thomas A. Markus,et al.  Development of a cold climate severity index , 1982 .

[14]  Jian Zhang,et al.  Achieving the 30% Goal: Energy and Cost Savings Analysis of ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2010 , 2011 .

[15]  David E. Claridge,et al.  Inverse Modeling Toolkit: Numerical Algorithms , 2004 .