January 27, 2006—Engineers have developed a method for “precooling” small office buildings and reducing energy consumption during times of peak demand, promising not only to save money but also to help prevent power failures during hot summer days.
The method has been shown to reduce the cooling-related demand for electricity in small office buildings by 30% during hours of peak power consumption in California’s summer.
Small office buildings represent the majority of commercial structures, so reducing the electricity demand for air conditioning in those buildings could help California prevent power-capacity problems like those that plagued the state in 2000 and 2001, said James Braun, a Purdue University professor of mechanical engineering.
The results focus on California because the research was funded by the California Energy Commission, but the same demand-saving approach could be tailored to buildings in any state.
Findings were recently presented during the Winter Meeting of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) in Chicago. Two of the papers were written by Braun and doctoral student Kyoung-Ho Lee. The other paper was written by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy laboratory managed by the University of California.
The method works by running air conditioning at cooler-than-normal settings in the morning and then raising the thermostat to warmer-than-normal settings in the afternoon, when energy consumption escalates during hot summer months. Because the building’s mass has been cooled down, it does not require as much energy for air conditioning during the hottest time of day, when electricity is most expensive and in highest demand.
Precooling structures so that it takes less power to cool buildings during times of peak demand is not a new concept. But researchers have developed a “control algorithm,” or software that determines the best strategy for changing thermostat settings in a given building in order to save the most money.
For more information, visit the Purdue Web site.
