Benchmarking

This paper describes an effort to build and partially validate an energy model of an existing educational building located in Cambridge, MA, USA. This work was carried out as part of a research seminar for graduate architecture/design students and included four related tasks: Modelling the building’s geometry and thermal properties in DesignBuilder/EnergyPlus, generating a site-specific weather file based on near-site measured data, assessing internal load schedules based on a detailed building survey, and collecting monthly metered data for heating lighting and cooling over a whole year.

Indoor environmental quality (IEQ), subjective satisfaction of occupants and energy conservation ofbuildings are usually determined separately. Since the energy crisis in 1973, engineers haveendeavored to implement energy conservation in buildings. Unfortunately, the effort resulted in energysavings without the fundamental delivery of indoor satisfaction in many cases. It is worthwhile todetermine a balance strategy between the potential energy saving and occupants satisfaction inworkplaces.

This paper describes ongoing energy benchmarking studies of double-skin façade buildings. Benchmarking methodology is discussed. Some preliminary results are presented.