Electricity consumption in Europe is constantly increasing, despite the fact that in recent years, huge efforts in terms of programs and regulations have been made towards energy demand reduction and energy systems improvement. Since the electricity demand affects both the operation of the supply and distribution plants and the thermal loads of buildings, the importance of providing a proper definition of demand profiles is evident. The main aim of the paper is to provide a set of standard electricity profiles that can reasonably be adopted as input in energy simulations related to the built environment, with particular regards to the Italian context. The work presented in this paper originated within a wider long lasting research aimed at developing a platform for buildings' energy simulations at district level, with particular reference to the Italian conditions. In this context, it was necessary to define hourly profiles regarding both occupancy and electricity use for lighting and appliances related to different building uses and typologies. For this purpose, the main methods and references for defining electricity loads in buildings were evaluated and average hourly profiles were accordingly developed for residential and commercial buildings. Then the related internal gains were determined and compared to the current Italian standards.
As refrigerator is a very common appliance in almost every household and it is the number one domestic appliance which operates whole day, it tends to consume a considerable amount of energy out of the whole country's domestic energy consumption. Personal as well as national level benefits can be achieved if energy efficient refrigerators were identified from available refrigerator types in the market. When empirical and theoretical results are perused it comes to note that there is no study done to understand the energy efficiency of various types of refrigerators by analyzing a large sample of real data. This study is a quantitative analysis of energy consumption of more than 40 samples of experimental results of key types of domestic refrigerators. The experiments were conducted inside a testing laboratory and energy consumption pattern was obtained from tested data. By analyzing the results, it was observed that inverter refrigerators are 22 % energy efficient than normal automatic defrosting refrigerators and 10% energy efficient than manual defrosting refrigerators. This outcome is mainly beneficial to general public as well as energy conservation policy makers for future decision making. It is recommended to promote inverter refrigerators for the case of national benefit.
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