Regression analysis of electric energy consumption and architectural variables of conditioned commercial buildings in 14 Braziliam cities

The aim of this work was to develop a simple model to predict the electric energy consumption of office buildings artificially air-conditioned, for  14 (fourteen) Brazilian cities (Belém, Brasília, Curitiba, Florianópolis, Fortaleza, Maceió, Natal, Porto Alegre, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, São Luís, São Paulo and Vitória). The building annual energy consumption was correlated  with  several architectural and constructive variables for each city analysed. Many variables were tested to seek those more important to be used to predict the electricity consumption. The variables that have been selected are the size of the building (number of floors and the shape size), the façade composition (window to wall ratio), thermal transmittance and absorptance of roof, the shading coefficient of glazing, the solar protection, façade and roof colours, occupation and electric power density (lights and equipments). The equations demonstrate good result with r2 higher than 0.99 for most cities.