Modeling Building Energy Demand for Distributed Renewable Energy System Planning

Due to the mismatch between the time-varying energy demand profiles and intermittent and fluctuating renewable energy supply, the excessive redundancy or severely deficiency planning results of the distributed renewable energy system typically emerge. This study develops a parameter-based model for the demand of electricity, space heating or cooling, and hot water in buildings. The impact of the energy demand profiles on the results of the planning problem is investigated based on a typical distributed renewable energy system. The numerical results demonstrate that there are significant differences between the energy demand profiles of different categories of public buildings in terms of demand level, variability, and volatility. Furthermore, the annualized capital and operating costs for the distributed renewable energy system significantly vary depending on the demand patterns and characteristics, sometimes by an order of magnitude, highlighting the significance of the demand profiles for the planning problem.