Modelling cooling demands in uk office buildings: the impact of using 3 different strategies to assess internal gains

This paper demonstrates how variations in the estimation of internal gains due to usage affect the cooling demands of speculative office buildings. The imprecise information available on these gains at the design stage has a large effect on the predicted energy demands of these buildings, which are being built to much higher energy performance criteria. This means in practice that designers of speculative office buildings are going to struggle to meet operational energy consumption targets unless they fully understand the implications of the choice of the internal gain strategy they use to account for the potential internal loads due to occupancy. The study compares and contrasts 3 different strategies suggested by the literature to assign these internal gains to offices and is applied in a UK case study office building. The focus of the analysis is the impact of the magnitude of these gains in the cooling demand to be met by the building services not the cooling energy consumption of these services.