Energy Reduction in Public Building Stock: Assessing the Impact of Control Strategy over Expected Energy Savings and Indoor Comfort Level

In the framework of EU FP7 BRICKER project, the renovation of public owned nonresidential buildings is addressed through the installation of innovative passive and active technologies. The expected impact is a primary energy reduction of about 50% with respect to the existing scenario with a large replication potential under different European countries.
In order to achieve such ambitious goal one issue that cannot be ignored is the effect of control
strategy, not only over the resulting energy performance but also over the resulting indoor comfort conditions.
In this paper, the actual control strategy implemented in the Belgian demo of Bricker project is introduced, compared against an ideal approach and accordingly optimized. The resulting proposed approach is then tested by means of numerical simulations over a base case scenario
before renovation.
The main conclusion of this work is the demonstration that control strategy of energy generation and distribution systems has to be revised whenever deep renovation of passive or active building technologies is undertaken. Contrarily to which, project renovation goals cannot be met.