Hourly Electrical Load, Cooling Load, and Ground Heat Exchanger Performance Profiles for College Buildings in Puerto Rico

This dataset provides the numerical source data underlying selected figures in an associated study of cooling system performance for college buildings at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. The data include modeled cooling demand, ground heat exchanger temperatures and thermal supply, electricity consumption, cooling tower makeup water use and cost, and system coefficients of performance (COPs). These values are simulation and postprocessed modeling results rather than measured campus operating data.

Building cooling loads were generated using EnergyPlus (see link below for more information) for a prototype college building under Typical Meteorological Year (TMY3) weather conditions for San Juan, Puerto Rico, with selected results also scaled to represent four buildings equivalent to the Facundo Bueso building. Long-term subsurface temperatures and thermal production for a two-doublet ground heat exchanger system were simulated using SUTRA, as documented in the accompanying SUTRA GeoTES model resource. Electricity consumption, water use, and COP were subsequently calculated for the three cooling scenarios using the component models, performance relationships, and assumptions described in the associated manuscript. The manuscript will be linked here when published.

The dataset includes prototype and scaled building cooling-load profiles, long-term ground heat exchanger performance for Scenario 2, comparisons between the cooling-tower system in Scenario 1 and ground heat exchanger system in Scenario 2, and integrated electricity, water-use, and COP results for the three scenarios. The spreadsheet is organized into column groups corresponding to manuscript figures and panels, with each group using its own independent time or cooling-load index. The data include hourly profiles for the first 720 hours, annual daily cooling demand for 365 days, load-dependent comparisons with 8,760 hourly observations, and seven-day-averaged ground heat exchanger results over 20 years. Occasional single-hour COP spikes occur during periods of very low cooling demand, when modeled electricity consumption approaches zero.