Methodology of comprehensive building energy performance diagnosis for large commercial buildings at multiple levels

The proposed energy performance diagnosis is intended to identify poor energy performance in a building and pinpoint the causes to provide suggestions for building operators to implement timely repair and maintenance. Many previous studies have probed the complicated problem of building energy performance diagnosis to achieve energy conservation and better performance. However, few of them have been successful because most of these methods rely on a large amount of data from an Energy Management and Control System (EMCS), and these data are unreliable. A detailed description of the methodology based on energy consumption data is presented in this paper along with the development of a prototype integrated toolkit. Weekly, daily and hourly diagnoses are developed at the whole building level, system level and component level, respectively. To validate the feasibility and applicability of the method, a case study on an office building demonstrating the proposed method was completed and was able to detect underperformance operation and energy waste.