The technical team at Exemplary Energy submitted three extended abstracts under the Solar Buildings and Solar Heating & Cooling stream for the 2022 edition of the APSRC. The presentations were given remotely by the main authors, and our team has timely made the recordings available on our YouTube channel. For our readers’ convenience, a brief summary of each paper with the respective videos are presented below:
- Quality Assurance of Available Meteorological Data presented by Dario Tarquini and authored by Dario Tarquini, Trevor Lee and David Ferrari. This paper investigated and compared several sources of meteorological data, providing quality assurance for their inclusion into weather and climate datasets for applications to engineering and architectural modelling. Substantial errors were identified, and their correction proposed in an overall update and extension of weather and climate data for the whole of Australia.
- Improving Australian Weather and Climate Data Services presented by Dario Tarquini and authored by Dario Tarquini, Trevor Lee and David Ferrari. Enhancements presented in the paper will support modellers to provide more reliable and timely results to aid the efficient design and management of both thermal and hygrothermal systems. The authors examined a series of recent improvements to weather and climate data services which increase their accuracy and usefulness for most applications such as:
- combining satellite-derived estimates of solar resources from a commercial partner with terrestrial observations of other weather elements obtained from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), providing users with the latest weather data;
- undertaking benchmarking simulations to provide valuable insights into the performance of commercial buildings and PV and other solar systems to owners and facility managers;Including coincident precipitation data to assist modellers’ and designers’ consideration of tightened requirements for moisture management under the National Construction Code (NCC) 2019;
- Characterising eXtreme Meteorological Years (XMY) for solar PV generation, HVAC energy use and moisture management simulations; and
- Improving estimates of cloud cover.
- Extreme Climate Data Files for Design Resilience presented by Huey Jean Tan and authored by Huey Jean Tan, Trevor Lee, and David Ferrari. This paper presented the development of an eXtreme Meteorological Year (XMY) for building HVAC. In a similar way that Reference Meteorological Year (RMY) represents the average (and historically expected) climate for a typical year, XMY for HVAC represents conditions that produce an extremely high or low building energy consumption across an entire year, and can be generated for any agreed degree of likelihood or ‘extremity’. This work will serve to provide modellers and project proponents with insights into the probability of high (or low) energy costs for the forward lifetime of the building, and provide opportunities for optimisation to improve the resilience of the building system to extreme climate.