A Flexible Quantification Method for Buildings’ Air Conditioning Based on the Light and Heat Transfer Coefficients: A Case Study of a Shanghai Office Building

The massive integration of renewable electricity places significant regulatory pressure on urban power grids. This has also promoted the development of virtual power plant technology. The air conditioning systems of public buildings, as one of the main cores of virtual power plants, have flexible regulation capability that is difficult to quantify accurately, leading to slow development in practical engineering applications. This study proposes quantifying the flexible regulation capability of public building air conditioning systems based on heat and light transfer coefficient (HTC and LTC). Taking a public building in Shanghai as an example, this study combines 3D modeling and simulation and sliding window and correlation analysis techniques to investigate changes in influencing factors under different time periods, levels of insulation performance, and window-to-wall ratios. Drawing an analogy with energy storage batteries, two quantification indicators, response time (RT) and response energy loss (RL), are proposed and combined with heat and light transmission systems for nonlinear fitting. Finally, a sensitivity analysis of the impact of external environment and building performance is conducted. The results of sliding window and correlation analysis show that surface irradiance has the highest correlation with air conditioning energy consumption (over 0.8). However, through linear and nonlinear fitting, it was found that HTC can better characterize the two key indicators of RT and RL in air conditioning flexible adjustment, with fitting degrees (R2) of 80% and 72%, respectively. The results obtained from this study can provide a quantitative reference for quantification and response control research into the flexible regulation capability of public building air conditioning systems.