Generation of a Test Reference Year (TRY): an application to the town of Palermo

Abstract

The improvement of the energy efficiency of buildings calls for the availability of tools for evaluating and simulating the thermal behaviour of buildings, needing as input climatic databases. These databases contain a very large amount of data, resulting in long computational time analysis. Therefore, simple aggregation methods are used, among which the test reference year (TRY). In this paper, a comparison between two statistical methodologies for compiling a TRY, the Belgian and the Sandia methods, is presented. Then, the two methods have been utilized for compiling the TRY for the town of Palermo, Italy, and compared both statistically and by means of two simple applications, obtaining quite different results. Thus, a particular caution in the choice of the method for generating such reduced sets of data is suggested.