Baseline Estimation of Commercial Building HVAC Fan Power Using Tensor Completion
This work addresses a specific need in building energy management for more accurate sub-component power estimation, representing an incremental improvement over whole-building methods.
The paper tackles the problem of estimating baseline power consumption for HVAC fans in commercial buildings to support demand response, proposing a tensor completion method that outperforms existing benchmarks on real building data.
Commercial building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems have been studied for providing ancillary services to power grids via demand response (DR). One critical issue is to estimate the counterfactual baseline power consumption that would have prevailed without DR. Baseline methods have been developed based on whole building electric load profiles. New methods are necessary to estimate the baseline power consumption of HVAC sub-components (e.g., supply and return fans), which have different characteristics compared to that of the whole building. Tensor completion can estimate the unobserved entries of multi-dimensional tensors describing complex data sets. It exploits high-dimensional data to capture granular insights into the problem. This paper proposes to use it for baselining HVAC fan power, by utilizing its capability of capturing dominant fan power patterns. The tensor completion method is evaluated using HVAC fan power data from several buildings at the University of Michigan, and compared with several existing methods. The tensor completion method generally outperforms the benchmarks.