The impact of using different weather datasets for predicting current and future energy performance of residential buildings in Egypt

Abstract

As prognostic methods for buildings’ performance in present and future, energy simulations mainly rely, among other inputs, on weather datasets including Typical Meteorological Years (TMY), where the selected measurement period of the weather station is a crucial parameter. To quantify the predicted energy consumption’s discrepancies that may occur while using a recently generated TMY (2018-TMYx) instead of the commonly used Egyptian TMY (ETMY) that were created in 2003, both weather datasets, in addition to their future climate change projections in 2050 and 2080, were applied into Design Builder’s energy performance simulations for two residential buildings in different regions of Cairo and Aswan, Egypt. Results show that using weather datasets from different periods caused a maximum difference in annual energy consumption per flat by 933 kWh in present and 1508 kWh in 2080. The study proves the obsolescence of the commonly used ETMY due to the significant differences in energy simulation readings compared to the 2018 datasets.