TOWST: A physics-informed statistical model for building energy consumption with solar gain

Existing data-driven models of building energy consumption have incorporated solar irradiance as a covariate without accounting for key physical constraints, leaving room for improvement in model performance and interpretability. In this paper, we propose the Time-Of-Week, Solar and Temperature (TOWST) model for quantifying building energy consumption. This new model incorporates solar gain into the well-known Time-Of-Week and Temperature (TOWT) model by accounting for important physics constraints, including, building orientation and the opposite impact of solar gain on heating and cooling. An iterative algorithm is developed to cluster the energy demand into heating and cooling categories, identify building orientation, and estimate the unknown model parameters. The model is applied to datasets generated from a building simulation according to international standard ISO 52016-1:2017, for a range of buildings types and locations. Results show a 30%–72% reduction in mean squared error relative to the TOWT model, across a range of different climatic conditions, demonstrating the significance of accounting for solar gain in a physically meaningful way.