A development and comparison of NAC estimates for linear and change-point energy models for commercial buildings

Abstract The normalized annual consumption (NAC) index has proved useful in energy analysis using the PRISM model. This paper develops NAC with rigorous statistical error diagnostics for linear and four-parameter change-point energy models. The models are applied to daily data from several case study commercial/institutional buildings, and the NAC estimates are analyzed and compared. The importance of goodness-of-fit for a model toward producing an accurate NAC estimate is examined. A new statistics, NSR, designed to measure goodness-of-fit over temperature regions of long-term significance, is introduced and tested on the case study buildings.