The Impact of Weather Variation on Energy Consumption in Residential Houses

Author

Mahelet G. Fikru, Missouri University of Science and TechnologyFollow
Luis Gautier

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of weather variation on energy use by using 5-minutes interval weather-energy data obtained from two residential houses: house 1 is a conventional house with advanced efficiency features and house 2 is a net-zero solar house with relatively more advanced efficiency features. Our result suggests that energy consumption in house 2 is not as sensitive to changes in weather variables as the conventional house. On average, we find that a one unit increase in heating and cooling degree minutes increases energy use by about 9% and 5% respectively for house 1 and 5% and 4% respectively for house 2. In addition, our findings suggest that non-temperature variables such as solar radiation and humidity affect energy use where the sensitivity rates for house 2 are consistently lower than that of house 1. Furthermore our result suggests that the sensitivity of energy use to weather depends on the season and specific time of the day/night.

Recommended Citation

Fikru, M. G., & Gautier, L. (2015). The Impact of Weather Variation on Energy Consumption in Residential Houses. Applied Energy, 144, pp. 19-30. Elsevier Ltd.

The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.01.040

Department(s)

Economics

Keywords and Phrases

Case study; Energy consumption; Intraday-variation; Solar energy; Solar radiation; Texas climate

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

0306-2619

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Apr 2015