IEEE Access (Jan 2024)
Deriving Power Consumption Models From Energy Bills for Optimal Sizing of Hybrid Power in Commercial Buildings
Abstract
In recent years, commercial buildings have turned to installing their own hybrid power plants to reduce extremely high energy costs. Arguments such as the efficiency of producing electricity where it is consumed, and government incentives also supported this process. The most common applications are power plants where one or more of cogeneration, trigeneration and solar panels are used together. However, for these advantages to emerge, the capacity of the hybrid power plant must be determined correctly, and the generated power must exactly match the consumed power. Achieving this is possible by knowing exactly the power consumption profile of the business. Businesses are only aware of monthly consumption information in kWh and only the mean consumption value can be calculated from this value. However, to accurately determine the power plant power to be installed, it is necessary to know the maximum and minimum power consumption values and the duration of these consumptions rather than the mean consumption. In this study, power consumption profiles that can be used as a reference in similar applications were presented for three different commercial buildings consisting of a supermarket, stores section and plaza. For these buildings, for which only monthly energy consumption values are known, the maximum and minimum power consumption values were expressed with mathematical models with the help of meteorological data such as monthly mean temperature and sunshine duration. R-square values obtained were found to be 0.99 for the supermarket, 0.97 for the plaza and 0.99 for stores sections. These high regression values show the reliability of the model and the accuracy of energy consumption predictions and can be used to estimate the energy consumption of similar commercial buildings and determine the capacity of hybrid power plants to be installed. In this way, no time would be wasted waiting for measurements to be taken to obtain the power consumption profile.
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