The development of standardized whole-building simulation assumptions for energy analysis for a set of commercial buildings

Whole-building energy simulations of commercial buildings are done for various reasons, such as to quantify the various energy components of the end-use building consumption profile, to quantify the energy savings benefit or penalty from modifying various building or system parameters, to assist in the commissioning process, to aid in building design process, and to aid the code development process. It is the intent of this paper to present a set of standardized assumptions for typical commercial buildings. These assumptions were developed from the criteria in ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2004, Energy Standard for Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings (ASHRAE 2004b), and prior published work outlining the typical use patterns and energy densities. Having a documented set of typical commercial buildings is very important when doing a comparative analysis of different energy-efficiency measures, and the set can serve as a standard set for the development of computer tools that perform such analysis. This standardized set is also very important for the development of prescriptive requirements for Standard 90.1. The present set of prescriptive requirements was developed with and is currently being updated with an inconsistent set of building assumptions using various levels of simplification. Previous studies have been published in this area, but none of them provided full and comprehensive lists that could be used to build complete energy models. Therefore, it is intended that by providing the key program inputs, future results can be duplicated and further analysis can be performed using the identical baseline.