A practical methodology for predicting electricity consumption of urban residential buildings

Abstract

It is a challenging task for determining the emissions and energy-saving options for counties and countries. In order to overcome this issue, two new concepts are introduced in this study. These are residential base electricity consumption and residential base natural gas consumption. A new model that estimates the total energy consumption of urban residential buildings from the available electricity consumption data is developed. The model employs heating degree days (HDD) and cooling degree days (CDD) parameters to predict the energy consumption for heating and cooling purposes. A month with zero or almost zero values of both HDD and CDD is considered as \"base month.\" These months when there is neither heating nor cooling, plays a key role in this study. The proposed model is applied to a county with a population of over 62,000 located in Southern Turkey, and the total electricity consumption is calculated with 1.24% accuracy. The validity and accuracy of the model are tested by theoretical electricity calculations, coal, and wood consumption. Accordingly, while annual electrical heating is equal to 2618 kWh/year for an average house of 96 m(2), for the coal and wood burning households, the annual energy consumption values are 2190 and 2616 kWh/year, respectively.