ASSESSMENT OF THE ENERGY SAVINGS DUE TO THE BUILDING RETROFIT

This paper explores a weather-normalization method for estimating the energy savings due to building retrofit, eliminating the effect of different weather conditions. The detailed computer program DOE-2.1B was used to estimate the energy consumption of an office building, and then the predictions of the daily energy use along with the daily average outdoor temperature were used to develop the energy signature of the building. One can observe that the energy signature, developed for one year, remains constant for all subsequent years, provided that no modifications of the building are performed. Therefore, the normalized energy consumption is calculated using the energy signature and the number of hours of occurrence of different outdoor temperature bins for the same reference year. The energy savings due to the building retrofit are obtained as the difference between the normalized energy consumptions before and after retrofit. The estimations of the proposed method are compared with the results of DOE-2.1B computer program, for gas and electrical consumption of an office building with complex schedules of operation and thermal control. © 1990.