HVAC terminal hourly end-use disaggregation in commercial buildings with Fourier series model

• Model for calculating light-plug submeter of office buildings is built.
• Models for calculating light-plug and power submeter of shopping malls are built.
• HVAC terminal hourly end-use disaggregation algorithm is set up.
• Four real commercial buildings are analyzed and the results are reasonable.

One major obstacle encountered in building energy conservation and retrofit is the lack of detailed energy submetering data. Direct submetering is expensive and sometime very difficult to be installed in real practice. For example, the HVAC terminal end-use electricity consumption is extremely difficult to measure, because its data is always mixed together with lighting-plug or power submeter. This paper presents a new approach to solve this problem, which is based on a Fourier series model (FSM) for calculating the lighting-plug and power submeters in commercial buildings, and then disaggregate the HVAC terminal end-use hourly electricity consumption from them. Compared with black-box models, such as ANN, SVM and so on, FSM as a grey-box model has two key advantages (1) the application is convenient because of its simple model structure and (2) once a model is developed, it can be used in other same type commercial buildings directly. Measured data from two office buildings and two shopping malls located in Shanghai are analyzed in this paper. The disaggregation results demonstrate that the method is accuracy within a reasonable degree. The calculated hourly HVAC terminal end-use electricial consumption is close to the real measured data. The MRE (mean relative error) and CV (coefficient of variability) both can be controlled within 10%, and in some special cases they are almost within 1%.