Modeling office building consumer load with a combined physical and behavioral approach : Simulation and validation

Due to an expanding integration of renewable energy resources in the power systems, mismatches between electricity supply and demand will increase. A promising solution to deal with these issues is Demand Response (DR), which incentives end-users to be flexible in their electricity consumption. This paper presents a bottom up simulation model that generates office building electricity load profiles representative for Northern Europe. The model connects behavioral aspects of office workers with electricity usage from appliances, and physical representation of the building to describe the energy use of the Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning systems. To validate the model, simulations are performed with respect to two data sets, and compared with real load measurements. The validation shows that the model can reproduce load profiles with reasonable accuracy for both data sets. With the presented model approach, it is possible to define simple portfolio office building models which subsequently can be used for simulation and analysis of DR in the power systems.