Development of a bottom-up white-box building stock energy model for single-family dwellings

Abstract

A new bottom-up white-box building stock energy modelling approach is presented in this paper. The model is a physics simulation-based stock model that can be used to compare the base case building stock with technological variations for comparative assessments. The model accuracy is compared to known stock data for a variety of categories, including end-use, energy source and building type. The model predicts the energy use of a building stock in a Canadian region with good agreement across all categories, with the total energy consumption of the model within 1.5% of the real stock energy use. Our analysis shows that modelling a sufficiently large sample of stock is required to reduce the expected deviation for lesser-represented portions of the stock. A case study illustrates how the model can be applied to compare different heating system distributions, in order to assess their impact on greenhouse gas emissions and peak electricity demand.

KEYWORDS:

• Residential
• building stock energy model
• bottom-up
• white-box
• greenhouse gas emissions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Institut de Valorisation des Données: [Grant Number PRF-2017-12].