Using Measured Building Energy Data to Infer Building Characteristics for Urban Building Energy Modeling

Brett Bass, Evan Ezell, Joshua New

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Buildings in the United States used 40% of total energy use in the United States in 2020, providing a significant opportunity to reduce energy use and the carbon footprint of the US. Modeling large numbers of buildings in a particular region maximizes this impact, allowing cities, utilities, or other stakeholders to determine the optimal solutions to reduce energy consumption in buildings based on modeling simulations. Building type is a critical input variable from which many significant building characteristics such as occupancy, equipment, lighting, etc., can be inferred if this data is not directly available. Aggregating the building type in a non-intrusive manner for large scale analyses can be difficult as there is no public database with the function of each building. For this reason, another method of assigning building type using measured building energy use was developed. Measured building energy use was compared to Department of Energy (DOE) prototype building energy models for about 46 thousand buildings from the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga service area to determine which prototype building was most representative of each individual building. Two methods of comparing the energy usage to the prototype building energy models at two different temporal resolutions were compared, with the building type assignments used to generate building energy models. Simulation results were compared to measured data to determine which method had the highest accuracy. It was determined that Euclidean distance was the optimal comparison metric and reduction of temporal resolution from hourly to monthly did not result in a major reduction in simulation quality.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2022 Building Performance Analysis Conference and SimBuild, IBPSA 2022
PublisherAmerican Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers
Pages173-180
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781955516211
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 Building Performance Analysis Conference and SimBuild, IBPSA 2022 - Chicago, United States
Duration: Sep 14 2022Sep 16 2022

Publication series

NameASHRAE and IBPSA-USA Building Simulation Conference
Volume2022-September
ISSN (Electronic)2574-6308

Conference

Conference2022 Building Performance Analysis Conference and SimBuild, IBPSA 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityChicago
Period09/14/2209/16/22

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Building Technologies Office. This research used resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan.

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