| Miscellaneous electric loads (MELs) comprise a growing percentage of commercial building energy use, expected to increase from 31% to 43% of total commercial building primary energy use by 2030. In building energy simulations, these loads are often poorly modeled or are outright neglected. A big box retail building with grocery was found to contain over 700 MELs. Through this study, 256 of those devices were metered, and the measured time-series data informed the creation of 260 EnergyPlus model snippets. Those model snippets were made publicly available through the newly developed Building Component Library (BCL). The use of these BCL components was worked into a modeler workflow, resulting in accuracy equal to the best of the commonly used plug load modeling strategies for an example building. The precision and detail of the BCL components exceeded the other methods. |
