PNNL

Abstract

Recent studies claimed that there is significant energy-saving potential for U.S. primary schools. As a major contributors to energy consumption, heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems in U.S. primary schools deserve to be studied. Occupancy-based control (OBC), a new control strategy for HVAC systems, provides a possible method to reduce energy consumption at U.S. primary schools. However, such an energy impact has yet to be evaluated for different climate zones. This paper conducts comprehensive research on the nationwide energy-saving potential for the U.S. primary schools with two different OBC strategies (presenting-based and counting-based). The workflow to evaluate the nationwide energy-saving potential consists of five steps: (1) model enhancement, (2) control strategy development and implementation, (3) simulation, (4) selective time-series data analysis, and (5) national-level quantification. First, by considering the stochastic behavior of occupants, we develop 96 building energy models for the U.S. primary schools, which consists of two code versions, 16 climate zones, and baseline case (without OBC) and two advanced cases (with OBC). Then, we design the two OBC strategies for HVAC systems and conduct simulations for different building energy models with different OBC strategies. Finally, we compare the control strategies and evaluate the energy-saving potentials by using different OBC strategies. The results show that there is significant energy-saving potential for U.S. primary schools by considering OBC strategies, especially the counting-based case. Meanwhile, there is a significant impact of the climate and code version to the energy saving from using OBC strategies.