Hourly Plug Load Measurements and Profiles for a Medium Office Building - a Case Study

To determine the end use energy utilization profiles of major building subsystems - heating, ventilation, cooling, lighting, plug loads and/or servers - and accurately target potential energy efficiency improvement measures as well as establishing a building's performance relative to peer facilities, it is necessary to establish dynamic plug load energy use associated with occupant activity. As building façade, HVAC, and lighting component technologies improve and optimally employed in the context of the integrated design of a building, plug load related energy use becomes a more dominant component of the overall building energy utilization index. To clearly identify potential building subsystem energy efficiency improvements and develop strategies for ameliorating increases in plug load energy use via dynamic control and occupant awareness and involvement, rapid plug load measurement and assessment techniques are necessary. The current lack of measured plug load data that could be used as input for energy modelling has represented a significant gap in associating energy models with real building energy consumption. In this investigation, the circuits of multiple distribution panels were monitored to create hourly energy use plug load profiles associated with different end users within a tenant space of a medium-sized office building. The main use within the monitored space was associated with specialty conference rooms (ICON Lab and Telepresence Room), servers, workstations, copier/printer, kitchen amenities, and vacuum cleaning. Furthermore, the energy use data was further characterized according to day type (weekday and weekend). As a result of this work, hourly plug load profiles were generated based on actual measured data which will be used as input to energy models.