Development of a Performance Rating Scheme of Air-Conditioning Systems for Buildings: A Case of Thailand

This paper adopts a concept of life cycle cost (LCC) to develop a scheme suitable to rate the energy performance of air-conditioning systems for Thailand. The developed scheme arranges the performance into three levels: good, very good, and excellent by which the excellent corresponds to that that provides the minimum system life cycle cost. The lowest performance level of the scheme is assigned corresponding to the minimum performance requirements of air-conditioning systems announced in Thailand's building energy code (BEC). In this study, the capital cost of air-conditioning equipment was obtained from the main manufacturers and distributors in the country. The operating cost was derived from the annual electrical energy consumption of the system simulated using a well-established software named “DesignBuilder”. The analysis results show that in most cases the best performance of chillers available in the market offers the minimum life cycle cost.