Smart technology enabled residential building energy use and peak load reduction and their effects on occupant thermal comfort

Residential buildings in the United States are responsible for the consumption of 38% of electricity, and for much of the fluctuations in the power demands on the electric grid, particularly in hot climates. Residential buildings are also where occupants spend nearly 69% of their time. As “smart” technologies, including electric grid-connected devices and home energy management systems are increasingly available and installed in buildings, this research focuses on the use of these technologies combined with available energy use data in accomplishing three main objectives. The research aims to: (a) better understand how residential buildings currently use electricity, (b) evaluate the use of these smart technologies and data to reduce buildings’ electricity use and their contribution to peak loads, and (c) develop a methodology to assess the impacts of these operational changes on occupant thermal comfort. Specifically this study focuses on two of the most significant electricity consumers in residential buildings: large appliances, including refrigerators, clothes washers, clothes dryers and dishwashers, and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. First, to develop an improved understanding of current electricity use patterns of large appliances and residential HVAC systems, this research analyzes a large set of field-collected data. This dataset includes highly granular electricity consumption information for residential buildings located in a hot and humid climate. The results show that refrigerators have the most reliable and consistent use, while the three user-dependent appliances varied more greatly among houses and by time-of-day. In addition, the daily use patterns of appliances vary in shape depending on a number of factors, particularly whether or not the occupants work from home, which contrasts with common residential building energy modeling assumptions. For the all-air central HVAC systems studied, the average annual HVAC duty cycle was found to be approximately 20%, and varied significantly depending on the season, time of day, and type of residential building. Duty cycle was also correlated to monthly energy use. This information provides an improvement to previously assumed values in indoor air modeling studies. Overall, the work presented here enhances the knowledge of how the largest consumers of residential buildings, large appliances and HVAC, operate and use energy, and identifies influential factors that affect these use patterns. The methodologies developed can be applied to determine use patterns for other energy consuming devices and types of buildings, to further expand the body of knowledge in this area. Expanding on this knowledge of current energy use, smart large appliances and residential HVAC systems are investigated for use in reducing peak electric grid loads, and building energy use, respectively. This includes a combination of laboratory testing, field-collected data, and modeling. For appliance peak load reduction, refrigerators are found to have a good demand response potential, in part due to the nearly 100% of residential buildings that have one or more of these appliances, and the predictability of their energy consumption behavior. Dryers provide less consistent energy use across all homes, but have a higher individual peak power demand during afternoon and evening peak use times. These characteristics also make dryers also a good candidate for demand response. The study of continuous commissioning of HVAC systems using energy data found that both runtime and energy use are increased, and cooling capacity and efficiency are reduced due to the presence of faults or inefficiencies. The correction of these faults have an estimated 1.4% to 5.7% annual impact on a residential building’s electricity use in a cooling-dominated climate such as the one studied. Overall, appliance peak load reduction results are useful for utility companies and policy makers in identifying what smart appliance may provide the most peak energy reduction potential through demand response programs. The results of the HVAC study provides a methodology that can be used with energy use data, to determine if an HVAC system has the characteristics implying an inefficiency may be present, and to quantify the annual savings resulting from its correction. The final aspect of this research focuses on the development of a tool to enable an assessment the effect of operational changes of a building associated with energy and peak load reduction on occupant comfort. This is accomplished by developing a methodology that uses the response surface methodology (RSM), combined with building performance data as input, and uncertainly analysis. A second-order RSM model constructed using a full-factorial design was generally found to provide strong agreement to in and out-of-sample building simulation data when evaluating the Average Percent of People Dissatisfied (PPD[subscript avg]). This 5-step methodology was applied to assess occupant thermal comfort in a residential building due to a 1-hour demand response event and a time-of-use pricing rate schedule for a variety of residential building characteristics. This methodology provides a model that can quickly assess, over a continuous range of values for each of the studied design variables, the effect on occupant comfort. This may be useful for building designers and operators who wish to quickly assess the effect of a change in building operations on occupants.