As buildings become increasingly connected and sensor-rich, intelligent remote heating control is rapidly superseding conventional local heating control. Such control algorithms often aim at reducing energy consumption by minimizing over-heating and utilizing free solar energy, for instance. Numerous companies offering heating optimization solutions have recently emerged. After installing such a system, end-users naturally want to quantify and verify the effect of such an investment, i.e., monetary return. Methods for tracking buildings' heating efficiency are diverse, ranging from simple weather normalization to more complex modeling approaches, but lack transparency and commonly agreed best practices. The problem is further complicated by the fact that buildings constantly undergo non-control-related changes that affect their energy efficiency, making it difficult to isolate and track only control-related effects using the existing methods. In this paper, we first review and derive methods for monitoring the overall efficiency of buildings, and show their inability to isolate the control effects from other changes happening in the buildings. We then propose a model-based approach for estimating and tracking only the control-related effects. Moreover, we show how the models can decompose the total control effect into sub-components to reveal where the energy effects come from. We demonstrate the methods using real data collected over approximately 10 years from the Danfoss Leanheat Building platform. Our scope focuses on district heated buildings with substation-level (supply temperature) control, but the methodology extends to other cases as well.

翻译：随着建筑日益互联且传感器日益丰富，智能远程供热控制正迅速取代传统的本地供热控制。此类控制算法通常旨在通过最小化过热和利用免费太阳能等方式降低能耗。近年来涌现出众多提供供热优化解决方案的公司。安装此类系统后，终端用户自然希望量化并验证此类投资的效益，即货币回报。追踪建筑供热效率的方法多种多样，从简单的天气归一化到更复杂的建模方法，但缺乏透明度且未形成公认的最佳实践。该问题因建筑持续发生非控制相关的能效变化而进一步复杂化，导致现有方法难以分离并追踪仅与控制相关的效应。本文首先回顾并推导了监测建筑整体效率的方法，揭示了其无法将控制效应与建筑中发生的其他变化相分离的局限性。随后提出一种基于建模的方法，专门用于估计和追踪仅与控制相关的效应。此外，我们展示了模型如何将总控制效应分解为子成分，以揭示能耗效应的来源。我们使用从丹佛斯Leanheat建筑平台收集的约10年真实数据对方法进行了验证。本研究主要关注具有换热站级（供水温度）控制的区域供热建筑，但该方法同样适用于其他场景。