Time series forecast of cooling demand for sustainable chiller system in an office building in a subtropical climate

Abstract

Commercial buildings can take up one-third of the energy related carbon emissions. There is limited research on forecasting cooling demands to evaluate sustainable air conditioning systems under climate change. This paper develops a simplified cooling demand model based on the time series of climatic and architectural variables to analyze carbon reduction by a sustainable chiller system. EnergyPlus is used to simulate hourly cooling demands of a hypothesized high-rise office building in Hong Kong under a change of architectural parameters and future climate conditions. An hourly cooling demand model with R2 above 0.9 is developed with inputs of the window-to-wall ratio, outdoor air enthalpy, global solar radiation, wind speed and their two steps ahead. The validated model is then used to analyze carbon reduction potentials by free cooling and a full variable speed chiller system. The low carbon technologies reduce carbon emissions by over 20% with but the reduction shrinks to 2.51–4.93% under future climate conditions. The novelty of this study is the simplified cooling demand model based on the time series of climatic and architectural variables. The significances of this study are to quantify carbon reduction by a sustainable chiller system under climate change and to appeal for more carbon reduction technologies for carbon neutrality.