Investigation of peak load reduction strategies in residential buildings in cooling dominated climates

This investigation of peak load reduction strategies in residential buildings contributes to the global international efforts in reducing energy consumption and is related directly to energy efficiency in residential and commercial buildings. Work reported here involves computer aided building energy simulation of energy efficient and non-energy efficient residential homes coupled with empirical energy consumption data gathered from monitoring an array of energy efficient residential homes. The latter have been implemented for peak load reduction strategies. In addition non-energy efficient residential homes have been monitored to compare performance to the energy efficient homes. This study demonstrates the crucial importance of energy efficiency and peak load reduction strategies in sustaining the energy needs of the southwest US region using Las Vegas for the actual setting. It provides the largest energy consumption data set examined, specifically peak consumption, from energy efficient and non-energy efficient homes at this location. The study demonstrates the peak load reduction benefits of a variety of strategies, namely roof-integrated PV panels, energy efficient building envelope, and substation battery storage. The study focuses on the month of August 2011 and shows how the load reduction can reach 75% at peak times during that month using the computer aided energy simulation. Moreover, the study compares the recorded electrical consumption data from the collection of energy efficient and non-energy efficient residential homes and proves the simulation results in reaching the 75% reduction in electrical consumption at peak times. The study also tries to marry the gathered electrical consumption data of the energy efficient and non-energy efficient homes with the computer simulation model. This is done to reach an actual representative model which behaves similarly to the average of the group of energy and non-energy efficient homes. The benefit of the energy efficient strategies in reducing the load in peak times is emphasized.