Virtual energy metering of whole building cooling load from both airside and waterside measurements
Published:
Sub-hourly data from buildings are becoming increasingly available and represent an untapped opportunity to better manage and operate buildings. To complement the available data, soft sensors and virtual meters could be developed to infer important variables (most notably, energy numbers) that are typically not measured. While research has mainly focussed on virtual meters at the local component level, this paper presents data-driven virtual energy meters to estimate cooling load at the whole building level. These virtual meters rely on measurements, as well as energy and mass balance equations from: 1) the chilled water plant, 2) the air handling units and 3) the variable air volume boxes and thermostats. Cooling load estimations were compared for a large Canadian commercial building, and the merits of each method are discussed in terms of uncertainty, ease of implementation and applications.
Recommended citation: Etienne Saloux, Kun Zhang. (2022) Virtual energy metering of whole building cooling load from both airside and waterside measurements. In: Proceedings of the 12th eSim Building Simulation Conference 2022, Ottawa, Canada, June 21–24.