Ivan Fu, M.Eng. 2014
Supervisor: Dr. Rodrigo Mora
In recent years, the City of Vancouver has been trying to push to make the whole community green and energy efficient. Hence, besides low-rise residential buildings, many new construction buildings and all rezoning construction requires building energy simulation analysis to be performed and acquire LEED Gold certification. This is to demonstrate that in terms of energy performance, the designed buildings are better than code or standard baseline buildings.
Typically, energy models are created through many assumptions and data input. From researches and statistics, many high-performance buildings are over-predicting their energy performance and some are even less efficient than the code or standard buildings. These discrepancies are often due to the lack of accuracy in the energy model.
On the other hand, to verify a building’s energy performance, it has to go through an expensive and complicated measurement and verification (M&V) process by following the International Performance Measurement & Verification Protocol (IPMVP), which requires the calibration of the energy model to minimize the difference in predicted and metered building energy usage. The benefit to go through this process is that it helps the building owner to have a better understanding of building performance and allows the facility manager to optimize the building’s operation. However, the high cost of doing M&V usually drives the building owners away from proceeding. In turn, not only will they miss the opportunity to further reduce building operation costs, but also the recognition for the environmental quality of their building operation.
This report provides a short energy modeling guideline in the appendix section to help with the creation of energy models and data collection. In addition, it successfully demonstrates the possibility of using Building Controls Virtual Test Bed (BCVTB) to exchange data between building automation systems and energy modeling software, EnergyPlus in this case. Through data exchange, energy modelers could provide more accurate input information to modeling software to enhance model accuracy. This could also potentially shorten and ease the model calibration process to reduce the M&V cost for the building owners.