Load Resilience in High Performance Buildings

Abstract

In the past 15 years there has been a sea change in the performance of the base building services of office buildings in Australia, particularly in the upper echelons of the market, with achieved efficiency levels far exceeding what had previously been considered possible. This has been achieved through innovations in control and operation of existing HVAC system types and the emergence of newer HVAC types. At the same time, there have been changes in how we occupy office buildings, with changes in computing loads and adoption of new work practices such as “agile working”. With these changes it is worthwhile to re-examine the fundamental assumption that underlies the NABERS base building rating, being that the performance of the base building is sufficiently independent of occupancy to enable the rating to be formulated without significant reference to the operations of the tenancies.In order to test this, a computer simulation model in IES has been developed and tested against a range of equipment and occupant density scenarios representing the traditional and agile workplaces to determine the extent to which the base building performance is sensitive to these factors.