On the Impact of Simplificationson Building Energy Simulation for Early Stage Building Design

The present paper stems from the benefits of the application of energy analysis in the early-stage building design combined with the difficulties that prevent this integration. The most common solution is to simplify the building energy model, although not enough attention is paid to understand the consequences of this action. The paper focuses on evaluating the impact of various building model simplifications on the outputs of the dynamic energy simulations. Three different case studies, featuring large non-residential buildings, are discussed in this paper. Differences in results are discussed in term of total heating and cooling energy loads for each simplification. Lastly the total differences between a fully simplified model and the corresponding detailed models are discussed more in detail.