Designing A Pre-cooling Model for Air Conditioning to Avoid an Electricity Price Spike for Different Building Characteristics

Abstract The air conditioning (AC) is a key driver to produce electricity consumption, particularly in residential buildings. In Indonesia, the electricity bill during pandemic covid-19 has increased to high level in hot days. This is because during these periods many consumers applied their AC for long time at the same time. It is therefore essential to developed an innovative model to control the electricity peak price and keep comfortable room during hot days. Many previous studies have confirmed that applied evaporative cooling or other technologies can minimize the whole consumption and cost. The aim of this research is to design a pre-cooling model (PM) for AC to avoid high electricity prices at midday during hot days. To achieve this goal a mathematical model was developed to define the energy cost (EC) and total cost (TC) for AC during the hot season. Under numerical optimization, the EC that can be minimized when a spike may occur due to increased temperature at midday for half hour (0.5 h) and one hour (1 h) spike cases. To justify this model, a PM was applied for two different building characteristics. As a result, the benefits of a PM if spike occurs for 0.5 h and 1 h was achieved, such as: IDR 10,061 (30.43%) and IDR 10,693 (24.44%) for building-1; IDR 12,071 (37.40%) and IDR 14,844 (34.97%) for building-2. In addition, the TC considering the probability of a spike of 0.5 h and 1 h if the spike occurs every five minutes were IDR 45,247 and IDR 38,287 for building-1 and building-2, respectively.