Management of cooling energy through building controls for thermal comfort and relative performance in an office building

Abstract

This study aims to improve the thermal environment of buildings and their occupants’ relative performance (RP) by having buildings exploit energy for cooling from energy saved when building controls are in place. Many countries restrict indoor set-point temperatures based on energy-saving policies, although such restrictions can compromise occupants’ thermal comfort and, in turn, their RP. This study first sets the existing building energy consumption, which limits indoor temperature settings in accordance with energy-saving policies, to baseline. The study then proposes a method to find an optimal hourly set-point temperature that represents the same energy consumption as the baseline—an optimal indoor-temperature-setting method that improves the RP of occupants while keeping the same energy consumption as the baseline. In this study, the time (hour) included in the thermal comfort range has increased from 0 h to 2 h, which consequently improved RP by 0.2% to 0.4%. This result indicates that the proposed approach is a cost-effective way to improve the RP of occupants without the additional consumption of energy by their buildings. The approach is ultimately applicable to building energy management systems as a method to improve the RP of occupants in buildings in which additional energy consumption relative to existing energy consumption presents a challenge.