Development of prototypical buildings for urban scale building energy modeling: A reduced order energy model approach

Abstract

Prototypical building energy models represent the “typical” energy consumption behavior of a group of buildings with similar functions, thus can serve the purpose of energy performance evaluation, urban energy planning, etc., for a buiding stock rather than a single building. Normative energy model is a special type of model in that it is both physically meaningful and computationally fast. In the current article, a general approach to establish prototypical building energy models based on normative method is proposed. This approach firstly selects “representative” buildings (those with distinct features) using clustering method, then develops normative model for each of the “representative” buildings, and estimate their energy related performance parameters. The estimated parameters are then statistically analyzed, and two different aggregation approaches are taken to calculate the parameters of the prototypical building energy model. To validate this approach, 34 office buildings in Qingdao City, China were chosen as testing cases. The results show that the prototypical building energy model built based on this approach is able to mimic the “typical” energy consumption behavior with reasonable goodness-of-fit metrics. Therefore, this approach is capable of evaluating the energy retrofit options of a group of buildings whose information except for energy use is unknown to the modeler, with good speed and acceptable accuracy.

Funding

The work described in the current article was fully supported by Program for Young Excellent Talents in Tongji University (No. 2014KJ029) and Shanghai Pujiang Talent Program (No. 15PJ1408100).