Study of typical meteorological years and their effect on building energy and renewable energy simulations

This paper investigates the generation of typical meteorological years (TMYs) and example weather years (EWYs)for Hong Kong, and studies their effects on the simulation results of the performance of building energy and renewable energy systems, i.e., solar and wind energy systems. According to various methodologies, different TMYs and EWYs were calculated using Hong Kong's weather data from the past 22 years. The results were used for a building energy simulation and for a hybrid solar-wind energy simulation, as two case studies, to study their effect on the simulation results. To validate the effect, deviations of the simulation results for different methods were compared. The results show that the difference could be very significant: -20% for hybrid solar-wind energy systems and a relatively smaller difference for building energy systems, ±5%. A larger error was produced by using EWYs compared with TMYs for both the building energy simulation and the hybrid solar-wind energy simulation. This proves that generating the right TMY is important for meeting different needs and various application systems.