Small power is a substantial energy end-use in office buildings in its own right, but also significantly
contributes to internal heat gains. Technological advancements have allowed for higher efficiency
computers, yet current working practices are demanding more out of digital equipment. Designers
often rely on benchmarks to inform predictions of small power consumption, power demand and
internal gains. These are often out of date and fail to account for the variability in equipment
speciation and usage patterns in different offices. This paper details two models for estimating
small power consumption in office buildings, alongside typical power demand profiles. The first
model relies solely on the random sampling of monitored data, and the second relies on a ‘bottomup’
approach to establish likely power demand and operational energy use. Both models were
tested through a blind validation demonstrating a good correlation between metered data and
monthly predictions of energy consumption. Prediction ranges for power demand profiles were also
observed to be representative of metered data with minor exceptions. When compared to current
practices, which often rely solely on the use of benchmarks, both proposed methods provide an
improved approach to predicting the operational performance of small power equipment in offices.
History
School
Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Published in
Energy and Buildings
Volume
75
Pages
199 - 209
Citation
MENEZES, A.C. ... et al, 2014. Estimating the energy consumption and power demand of small power equipment in office buildings. Energy and Buildings, 75, June 2014, pp. 199–209.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0/