Extreme reference years for building energy performance simulation

Abstract

The analysis of building energy performance resilience requires also the assessment of energy needs under untypical boundary conditions. This implies the adoption of reference years remarkably warmer or colder than typical ones. Nevertheless, while several researches in the literature and technical standards provide instructions to build typical years, there is no standard procedure for the extreme ones. In this work, starting from the approach described by EN ISO 15927-4:2005 for typical reference years, TRYEN, based on Finkelstein-Schafer statistics of weather variables, a new method is proposed to develop hot and cold extreme reference years, ERYh and ERYc, from multi-year hourly weather series. Two alternatives are evaluated for the selection of reference months–according just to dry bulb temperature statistics or also considering global horizontal irradiance ones. To discuss the representativeness of proposed reference years against multi-year series, TRNSYS simulations are run for 48 simplified buildings in five Italian climates.