A Case Study in Actual Building Performance and Energy Modeling with Real Weather Data

As part of this study, an issue has been identified with regards to there being a performance gap with energy efficient buildings. This has been validated through literature review in the areas of occupancy behavior, modeling accuracy and reviewing energy consumption of energy efficient buildings. In order to analyze the error generated between predicted and actual energy performance, a case study approach has been adopted. The Ron Joyce Centre is a LEED Gold Certified building that is part of the McMaster University campus in Burlington. Actual energy performance data has been collected along with detailed drawings to analyze its predicted energy performance using real weather data over a two-year period in eQUEST. The results indicate that eQuest is able to predict electrical consumption within 0.72% of actual on an annual basis. However, natural gas consumption is more erratic and inconsistent based on heating degree days and has fluctuating values with differences ranging between 21% to 4.5% on monthly basis. The overall predicted energy consumption for 2012 is 1096133 kWh and 33227 m