<p>A recent report from the U.S. Department of Energy states that residential buildings account for the most electricity consumption by sector in the United States (37%), which includes commercial buildings, industrial buildings, and transportation. Research to implement home energy management systems (HEMS) to control the energy usage in residential buildings has been done, but many existing approaches cannot account for varying energy usage behaviors among users. For example, someone who prefers a higher temperature versus a lower temperature or someone who is willing to pay more for extra comfort versus someone who would rather save money by tolerating discomfort. Recently, researchers from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) have developed a tool (foresee™) to optimize the operation schedule of energy systems in a residential building with consideration of different user behaviors. In this work, we use foresee™ to provide a sensitivity analysis of different energy usage behaviors with multiple objectives: maximize economic savings, minimize carbon footprint, and maximize thermal comfort. The goal of this study is to quantify the impact of different usage behaviors in homes. To account for the different behaviors, appropriate weighting factors were applied to the objectives based on the user. This work explored a way to ensure the equal weightings for each of the objectives and to get realistic impacts on energy consumption for six different cases based on individual’s ranking of thermal comfort, carbon footprint, and cost savings by order of importance. The optimization strategy resulted in reduced energy consumption (-1% to -29% for the six cases), reduced cost (-5% to -30% for the six cases), and reduced carbon emissions (-1% to -29% for the six cases), while maintaining a thermal discomfort comfort of 3.90 K·hr to 8.77 K·hr during a one week period for a house in Golden, Colorado. The results from this sensitivity analysis show that economic cost and carbon emissions are closely correlated because the most expensive time of use pricing often coincided with the highest rate of carbon emissions. The study also shows that varying energy usage behaviors will have a significant impact on the results and is important to consider when modelling residential buildings. The largest difference occurred between a user who prioritized thermal comfort over economic savings and carbon emission reduction and a user who prioritized carbon emissions reduction over economic savings and thermal comfort. The energy consumption difference over a single week was 53.76 kWh (or 28% of the energy consumed by a house with no HEMS). These outcomes will provide a more realistic guideline for various energy saving strategies in residential buildings and validates foresee™ as an effective tool for modelling varying energy usage behaviors.</p>

Sensitivity Analysis of Occupant Preferences on Energy Usage in Residential Buildings

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ES/ES2021/volume/84881

ASME 2021 Energy Sustainability (ES2021)

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