Occupant Plugload Management for Demand Response in Commercial Buildings: Field Experimentation and Statistical Characterization
share
Commercial buildings account for 36 nearly two-thirds is met by fossil fuels [1]. Reducing this impact on the environment requires improving energy efficiency by lowering energy consumption.The overall building energy consumption comprises of Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning (HVAC - 47 Process Loads (PPLs - 33 methods to regulate HVAC and Lighting systems. However, methods to regulate occupant plugload are relatively not well-understood. To this end, we conducted multiple experiments to study changes in occupant plugload consumption due to monetary incentive and/or feedback. These experiments were performed in commercial office and university buildings within the NASA Ames Research Center. Analysis of the data from these experiments reveal the significance of plugload reduction in the presence of feedback and/or incentive interventions. We propose autoregressive models to predict expected plugload savings in the presence of exogenous variables. Our contribution facilitates the consideration of occupants-in-the-loop within the classical demand response paradigm.
READ FULL TEXT