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Demand Profile Generators
The purpose of this section is to define why
we created a tool to generate the community's demand profile
as well as present an outline of how this tool works.
Why ?
During the progress of the project the team has identified
that in order to proceed to the third step of the methodology
(offsetting)
there is a need to generate the energy demand profile of
the community being analyzed. The energy demand profile
is essential in the offsetting procedure, in order to ensure
the proper sizing of the Renewable Energy supply.
Unfortunately the majority of the R.E applications are
using the National-Typical demand profile which is not taking
under consideration the diversification in demand different
communities might have. The team has identified that the
energy demand profile can vary significantly among communities
due to several reasons. The most important are presented
below.
• Different Housing Stock
• Different occupancy types
• Different consumer behavior
Unfortunately the later is not easy to measure and thus
not easy to model. However, it can affect the energy demand
by a factor of 20-50 % as indicated by an extended research
[2].
Developing a model that can predict the energy consumption
with respect to Social factors, like consumer behavior,
requires extended research that is currently being curried
out and is not among this project's objectives.
For the needs of this project the team has developed a
tool that can generate the energy demand profile for a wide
variety of residential communities. It consists of two different
parts; the Electricity Demand generator (E.D.p.
generator) and the Heating Demand generator
(H.D.p. generator).
Electricity Demand profile generator
(E.D.p):
The E.D.p. generator is a tool
that was developed to generate the electricity demand profile
of a whole community. The code is based on probability models
that predict the possibility of each household to operate
a certain amount of appliances on a certain time of the
day for differrent end users (occupancy types). The database
of this tool was compiled with respect to the National statistical
data for electricity used in appliances in UK households
[1]. Furthermore, the usage patterns incorporated in the
tool were extracted from research in the UK (go
to references) and a detailed survey
conducted in the Riverside community, Stirling (Case
Study).
The tool was originally designed to provide quick and accurate
results about the electricity demand of a single household
as well as the whole community.
The E.D.p's only inputs are:
-
The Census Demographic results, which care
available for every community in the UK.
-
The annual electricity consumption, which
can be obtained simply by making an enquiry to the utility
company that serves the community.
The tool is using an hourly step calculator, but we belive
this is enough to provide a rough estimation of the daily electricity
demand. However, this tool can be developed even more to implement
an, up to, five minutes time step so that the results can be
used directly to introduce a community CHP scheme.
To use this tool online please enable "MACRO" commands
in the EXCEL version you have installed first.(how
?)
To use this tool simply click here.
The link above will open an spreadsheet on line in which you
will be asked to insert the Census Demographic data for the
community. You will be also asked to insert the annual electricity
consumption of the community. However, the interface is set
for our case study, but you can click the defferenciate button
so you can use any community's annual electricity consumption.
For any other enquires regarding the Electricity Demand Profile
Generator, please email esru@strath.ac.uk. specifying the name
of the project and the year that it has been conducted (2006-2007).
(See
how it works)
Heating Demand profile generator (H.D.p)
(use
it online):
The H.D.p generator
is a tool that was developed to generate the Heating Demand
profile. Using the building stock in the Riverside community
(Case
Study),as this was indicated by our
Survey, and the Scottish building
construction data, as they are defined in S.D.EM. software,
we created 480 ESP-r models. Running these models we generated
a database for this building stock which includes details
about the daily heating energy required for each type of house.
Our next task was to develop an algorithm related with a user
friendly interface in order to process and present this large
amount of data. The outcome was a frienfly user interface
that can generate the energy demand profile in terms of energy
delivered to heating. The following link presents a schematic
outline of the "Heating Demand profile generator (picture).
to use this tool simply click here
The link above will open a spreadsheet online
in which you will can navigate using the tags provided. the
main page is called "specific housetype demand profile".
This page is useful if you would like to generate the specific
house type demand profile. Using the button named "Go
to the community demand profile generator" you are introduced
in the interface of the Community Demand profile generator.
Following the instructions provided, you can generate every
community's heating demand profile simply by inserting the
following data:
-
Census Demographics
- More details about the building stock of the community
The interface is set to represent the case study we used to
test this tool. However, you can easily insert the data of the
community you would like to generate the demand profile, simply
by inserting different values in the appropriate cells. For
any enquires, please email esru@strath.ac.uk specifying
the name of the project as well as the year it has been conducted
(2006-2007).
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