Data-driven energy efficiency and flexibility in commercial buildings
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Commercial buildings offer significant potential to reduce cooling load by raising zone temperature setpoints. This is useful for demand response, avoiding blackouts during heat waves, and during normal operations to reduce costs, water usage, and emissions. We performed experiments in seven commercial buildings on the Stanford University campus. We found that buildings responded differently to temperature setpoint adjustments with load reductions ranging from 4 to 29 percent. This work explores the drivers for response heterogeneity by analyzing equipment-level behavior. Distributed sensor data throughout the buildings is used to diagnose the behavior of Air Handling Units, Variable Air Volume systems and Fan Coil Units. The main driver for load reduction was changes in chilled water valve positions, which differs from previous experiments reported on in literature. One possible explanation is that the HVAC equipment in these buildings implement the most recent ASHRAE standards of supply air temperature (SAT) reset through logic called Trim-and-Respond. This finding suggests that new building control sequences could alter conclusions from previous DR field experiments. It is also found that the interaction of ventilation and cooling requirements can impact operational energy efficiency, sometimes causing over-cooling of certain zones. Over-cooling is quantified in terms of temperature difference and the cooling load that is wasted by keeping zone temperatures below the cooling setpoint. We also find that dominant zones with high cooling requirements play an important role in determining building flexibility. Dominant zones included in experiments can drive large load reductions observed from setpoint changes. If the zone is excluded, the building will not be responsive to setpoint changes. High flexibility is seen from buildings without ventilation constraints and buildings with dominant zones included in experiments. This is true even if the building has high levels of wasted cooling. In this case, the building is inefficient but has high flexibility. Buildings with ventilation constraints or dominant zones excluded from experiments are less dependable flexibility resources.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | June 7, 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | McMahon, Caitlin |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor | Brandt, Adam |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Energy Resources Engineering |
Subjects
| Subject | demand response, energy efficiency, buildings |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- McMahon, C. (2022). Data-driven energy efficiency and flexibility in commercial buildings. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/nh553tb9310
Collection
Master's Theses, Doerr School of Sustainability
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- Contact
- mcmahonc@stanford.edu
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