TO-98-02-3 -- The Impact of Different Weather Data on Simulated Residential Heating and Cooling Loads PDF

Since 1995, two major new sources of typical year weather data--ASHRAE's Weather Year for Energy Calculations, Version 2 (WYEC2), for 59 U.S. and Canadian locations and NREL's Typical Meteorological Year, Version 2 (TMY2), for 239 U.S. locations--have become available for use in building energy simulations. Both of these data sets represent several years of effort in correcting data anomalies and adding improved solar models to the earlier WYEC and TMY weather sets. Although it is straightforward to tabulate and compare the changes in climate statistics, e.g., degree-days, wind speed, average solar heat gain, etc., the impact that such changes have on the simulated energy consumption of a building is less clear. The purpose of this study is to use DOE-2 simulations of prototypical residential buildings to (1) determine the ability of various typical year weather data such as TMY2, TMY, WYEC2, WYEC, and TRY to reproduce the long-term average heating and cooling energy consumption when simulated using 30 years of historical weather data and (2) compare the simulated energy consumption from different typical year data and determine if there are systematic differences due to the type of weather data.

Units: I-P