scope:

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, many new building system technologies have been developed with the promise of conserving energy. The energy saving potentials of these technologies are often strongly dependent on some combination of climate, building use, envelope design, HVAC system design and plant design and their specific application. Some technologies (e.g., speed control using VFD, or replacement of lighting fixtures with more efficient ones) can be evaluated using a simple spreadsheet- type calculation. Others require more sophisticated tools to account for multiple effects on the building envelop, thermal comfort and different building systems. Due to the difficulty of evaluating these new technologies through simple traditional methods, energy simulation software has emerged as the most efficient and effective method of evaluating the potential of a specific energy conservation technology applied to a specific building. Modern simulation tools such as EnergyPlus [Strand, 2000] and ESP-r [Hand, 2006 Clarke 2001] are well tailored to analyze these new energy conservation measures (ECM). In these modern simulation tools, models for many ECMs already exist or can be composed from elements within the tools. Expert users of these tools can readily assemble the building, system and plant data required to construct a building model. Typically this information, along with climate data, building use data, and typical system control strategies, is gleaned from on-site inspections, architectural drawings, and published equipment performance data. Once the basic model of the building has been constructed the expert simulation user can modify the simulation input to create model variants to evaluate each energy conservation measure of interest. ECMs can be evaluated one at a time or in combination with other measures. Budgetary rather than simulation program constraints usually limit the number of promising technologies that can be evaluated for a particular project. The success of the process therefore is strongly dependent on the ability of the design engineer to select from a list of 20 to 100 possible energy conservation measures that are applicable and the most cost efficient for a particular building.

This paper presents a simulation-based approach to the screening process that selects candidate technologies for a particular building. The first section of the paper describes the conceptual design of the simulation-based screening tool. This is followed by an account of several case studies for an industrial building that illustrates the feasibility of the proposed approach and discusses the simulation tools required to effectively analyze and compare a large number of ECMs. Screening of ECMs is conducted to develop a database with promising energy saving technologies and measures for an interactive IT-tool under the International Energy Agency Energy Conservation in Buildings and Community Systems project - Annex 46 "Holistic Assessment Tool-kit on Energy Efficient Retrofit Measures for Government Buildings (EnERGo)." [Annex 46]