Impact of occupant diversity on energy demand
The diversity of commercial building occupants' profiles should be taken into account in district energy demand and supply models for improved accuracy, wrote FCL researchers in a paper.
Energy consumption of buildings are dynamic, interactive and complex in nature, which make urban building energy models (UBEM) important planning tools for district energy systems. However, current UBEM approaches do not take into account the diversity in occupancy profiles among buildings of the same function, when in fact, the diversity of occupant profiles could have a significant impact on energy consumption.
In the paper external pageImpacts of diversity in commercial building occupancy profiles on district energy demand and supply published in Applied Energy, FCL researchers use data-driven occupancy profiles to take into account occupant diversity, in order to improve the accuracy of district energy demand and supply simulations.
A novel method is proposed to create context-specific, data-driven commercial building occupancy profiles to generate diverse and non-diverse urban building occupant presence models (UBOP). Based on a case study in Singapore, UBEM simulations for district energy efficiency benchmarking, renewable energy integration potential, and district energy system design was run to assess the impact of diverse versus non-diverse UBOP.
The results demonstrate that, because of the relationship between occupant presence and building systems operation, occupancy profiles are important factors in district energy demand predictions. For the case study, the energy demand estimation is significantly influenced by the shape of occupancy profiles, which in turn, could have broader implications on design decisions of district energy systems. Therefore, it is advisable to use diverse UBOP and to run probabilistic UBEM simulations for district energy system design.
This research by Gabriel Happle, Dr Jimeno Fonseca and Prof. Arno Schlueter is conducted as part of FCL’s research project Multi-scale Energy Systems for Low Carbon Cities