A new method for evaluating the normalized energy consumption in office buildings

Information derived from utility bills for commercial buildings can be directly used to define indices such as energy budget (kWh/m2/yr), energy cost ($/m2/yr) or load factor. An analysis of these data reveals patterns of energy use in buildings and serves to disaggregate the total energy use among major end-uses. For example, weathernormalization permits comparison of the energy consumption of a building in two different years by eliminating the effect of different climatic conditions. In this paper, a new method is presented for weather-normalization and is used to evaluate the normalized energy consumption in several office buildings in Montréal. Finally, the results derived from our new method are compared with those obtained from the well-known PRISM method, using utility bills from 24 gas-heated buildings and 14 electrically-cooled buildings.