Numerical estimation and sensitivity analysis of the energy demand for six industrial buildings in France

When it comes to dealing with energy savings in buildings, studies almost systematically focus on the residential and tertiary building stocks while the industrial building stock is ignored. This study comes as a first step to move forward on this topic and its objectives are threefold: first to develop a simple methodology suitable for various industrial activities, then to analyse the distribution of the energy demand by use for six different cases and, finally, to carry out a sensitivity analysis. A first observation was that the energy demands for HVAC and lighting systems and the heat loads were of the same order of magnitude. The energy demand for heating and cooling was normally distributed, and the uncertainty on the results lay between ±20% and ±40% for most cases. The influence of six weather conditions was estimated for all of the six buildings and found to be significant, yet not uniformly.