2017 ASHRAE Annual Conference

Thermal load management studies have been carried out at small and large scale, covering all the range from a single building to the country level, although prior research provides valuable information on the possible energy management schemes and gains, the large scale studies typically suffer shortcomings. This paper addresses those shortcomings focusing on the existing building stock. It describes a comprehensive tool to estimate the potential for thermal load management at large scale accounting for the buildings passive storage potential. The paper also describes the application to a 10 buildings case-study in Geneva (Switzerland) and quantifies the associated gains.

Energy efficiency in buildings is one of the key measures to tackle global energy and emission concerns. The large share of air conditioning in commercial buildings makes air conditioning systems as primary targets for retrofitting. This paper studies 50 commercial buildings in Singapore that have undergone chiller plant retrofitting. The energy audit reports from these buildings are studied in detail to gather data related to building energy consumption and chiller plant efficiency (measured in kW/RT). The energy utilization index (EUI) which is measured as the total energy per square meter is analyzed for these buildings before and after retrofitting.

Commercial buildings alone are responsible for 36% of the total United States electricity consumption, and on average 30% of this electricity consumption is wasted. One of the greatest challenges in improving building energy efficiency lies in the ability to do simple and non-intrusive disaggregation. Building energy disaggregation extracts system and equipment level energy signals from a whole building’s energy consumption data. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised non-intrusive building energy disaggregation technique using 15-minute interval whole-building energy consumption and weather data. The proposed disaggregation technique consists of an analysis loop with three steps.

Benchmarking energy use can help building owners and managers to assess building energy performance and to identify energy efficiency opportunities. Energy consumption data makes it easy to understand the energy use characteristics of each building, and can promote occupants’ awareness of building energy efficiency when providing an energy performance index developed from this data. As a way of improving energy efficiency in the building sector, the Korean government has developed a nation-wide integrated energy consumption database with more than six million building records. This paper introduces the framework of the national building energy consumption database and to analyze energy use characteristics of office buildings across the country.