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Air conditioning consumes one third of peak electric consumption in the summer.
What is the topic of your research?
AC units are climate control systems,
used both in winter and summer.
We have carried out a study for the summer period,
and that is why we have compared the electric consumption,
in particular of AC units,
with the total electric consumption of the whole city,
to determine the electric demand derived from the use of AC
in the total consumption, in this case, of the region of Madrid.
This is even more interesting for the peak consumption of Madrid,
which can account for 33%, one third of the electricity used in summer periods.
The peak electric consumption in summer can be caused by the use of AC units.
How have you carried out this research?
We carried out a simulation of the electricity consumed
with the help of data from the Spanish National Statistics Institute
on the number of households and units,
to assess the consumption
derived from the air conditioning or cooling systems in Madrid.
How can the results of this research be applied?
There was no previous mathematical simulation,
or at least we didn’t know of one, or considered it wasn’t
adequately developed for Madrid.
That is where the idea came from.
The idea is that the consequences...
Knowing the electric consumption of a big city
can give us an idea on how to focus our future research.
In the sense that if we are able to reduce by 5%
the consumption of our units,
improve the efficiency of our systems,
that would result, especially for a big city, in so much energy
that the peak electrical demand would decrease.
This information is also very interesting for electric companies
and for reshaping the entire electrical grid in general.
Can we reduce the electricity consumption of AC systems?
For now the results are positive.
We are improving the efficiency of the machines.
We have a heat pump that works with solar energy
and improves the output and efficiency in 25% to 50%
depending on the use,
when there is solar energy, when we have sun.
What we will try from now on is to adapt the demand to the consumption.
Or, rather, the consumption to the demand,
so that when the demand is lower,
when the cooling values are lower, the system consumes less.
The seasonal demand profile changes continuously.
In fact, according to Madrid’s average, the units function at half their capacity.
We buy a unit with a high capacity but it will function at half its power
throughout the whole summer, for example.
The problem is that, when they function at partial capacity,
the performance is low.
Our aim is to, when the demand is lower,
reduce also the consumption levels of the machine,
or reduce them proportionally, because it is not normally like that.
If we are capable of improving the performance at that partial level,
when we need less energy, when the demand is lower,
we will be able to substantially lower seasonal consumption.
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