The Impact of Occupant Behaviour on Energy Consumption at Resi-dential Buildings

Abstract

Buildings are responsible for 40 percent of energy consumption in cities and cities are responsible for 60 to 80 percent of the total energy consumption in the world. Besides energy consumption in the industrial market which has complex dynamics to investigate, residential buildings have a big piece of the pie in this share. To avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change and depletion of sources, energy demand and correspondingly energy consumption in cities should be controlled immediately by every energy con-sumer. In this matter, the control of energy demand depends principally on the actions of the users. Evaluating the social science behind energy consumption is not the study area of this research but the impact of adaptive behaviours to control indoor comfort are main objectives. This study goals to examine the effect of occupant behavior through Design-Builder with hypothetical and probabilistic scenarios which are configurations of Occu-pancy, Heating, Cooling, DHW, Equipment and Lighting schedules and setpoints. Three different building typologies from 3 different cities and climates` building energy performance will be analyzed through the combination of two other variables: thermal condition of the buildings and user behavior. The user behaviors are grouped into two as economic and wasteful. In the end, the comparative results of the scenarios were analyzed. The final comparison analysis confirms the assertion of the study that user behavior effects the energy demand directly proportional; wasteful occupant has the highest energy demand while the scenarios based on the Spanish technical code for energy savings has the opti-mal and economic scenarios have the lowest. The analysis of the study leads to an un-touched area of study to enlarge the scale and examine the impact of occupant behavior at low energy districts and cities to prevent the negative effects of increased urban energy consumption.