Energy Technologies

Today's selection of DC buildings features a diverse set of electrical topologies and turnkey solutions, and each has specific design trade-offs and optimizations. Designers desperately need standardized metrics and procedures for measurement and verification (MV) to analyze and compare the advantages of each DC solution to traditional AC building networks. This work develops the Measurement-Informed Modeling (MIM) method, which can be used to determine full-building efficiency and energy savings. The MIM MV procedure develops a building model, and refines the model with metered data. This work demonstrates the MIM method by measuring the full-building efficiency of two DC buildings operated by the Institute of Building Research in Shenzhen, China. The MIM procedure can ultimately be used to compare and improve the efficiency of various DC topologies.