I found this comprehensive research report:
Energy Use in the Australian Residential Sector 1986–2020 (June 2008)
(several PDFs for download, click the link Energy Use… to display them)

There are many interesting results – and the level of detail is impressive: The authors modelled the energy used per appliance type, by e.g. factoring in how building types change slowly over time or by modelling the development of TV sets and their usage. Occupancy factors for buildings are determined from assumptions about typical usage profiles called Stay At Home, At Work or Night Owl.

I zoom in on simulating and predicting usage of air conditioning and thus cooling energy:

They went to great lengths to simulate the behavior of home owners to model operations of air conditioning and thus total cooling energy for a season, for a state or the whole country.

The authors investigated the official simulation software used for rating buildings (from …part2.pdf):

In the AccuRate software, once cooling is invoked the
program continues to assume that the occupant is willing to
tolerate less than optimal comfort conditions and will therefore terminate cooling if in the absence of such cooling the internal temperature would not rise above the summer neutral temperature noted in Table 57, + 2.5oC plus allowances for humidity and air movement as applicable. While this may be appropriate for rating purposes, it is considered to be an unlikely form of behaviour to be adopted by householders in the field and as such this assumption is likely to underestimate the potential space cooling demand. This theory is supported by the survey work undertaken by McGreggor in South Australia.

This confirms what I am saying all the time: The more modern a building is, or generally nowadays given ‘modern’ home owners’ requirements, the more important would it be to actually simulate humans’ behavior, on top of the physics and the control logic.

The research study also points out e.g. that AC usage has been on the rise, because units got affordable, modern houses are built with less focus on shading, and home owners demand higher standards of comfort. Ducted cooling systems that cover the cooling load of the whole house are being implemented, and they replace systems for cooling single zones only. Those ducted systems have a rated output cooling power greater than 10kW – so the authors (and it seems Australian governmental decision makers) are worried about the impact on the stability of the power grid on hot days [*].

Once AC had been turned on for the first time in the hot season, home owners don’t switch it off again when the theoretical ‘neutral’ summer temperature would be reached again, but they keep it on and try to maintain a lower temperature (22-23°C) that is about constant irrespective of temperature outside. So small differences in actual behavior cause huge error bars in total cooling energy for a season:

The impact of this resetting of the cooling thermostat operation was found to be significant. A comparison was undertaken between cooling loads determined using the AccuRate default thermostat settings and the modified settings as described above. A single-storey brick veneer detached dwelling with concrete slab on ground floor and ceiling insulation was used for the comparison. The comparison was undertaken in both the Adelaide and the Darwin climate zones. In Adelaide the modified settings produced an increased annual cooling load 64% higher than that using the AccuRate default settings.

The report also confirms my anecdotal evidence: In winter (colder regions) people heat rooms to higher temperatures than ‘expected’; in summer (warmer regions) people want to cool to a lower temperature:

This is perhaps not surprising, de Dear notes that: “preferred temperature for a particular building did not necessarily coincide with thermal neutrality, and this semantic discrepancy was most evident in HVAC buildings where preference was depressed below neutrality in warm climates and elevated above neutrality in cold climates (ie people preferred to feel cooler than neutral in warm climates, and warmer than neutral in cold climates)” (Richard de Dear et al 1997, P xi).

I noticed that the same people who (over-)heat their rooms to 24°C in winter might want to cool to 20°C in summer. In middle Europe AC in private homes has been uncommon, but I believe it is on the rise, too, also because home owners got accustomed to a certain level of cooling when they work in typical office buildings.

My conclusion is (yet again) that you cannot reliably ‘predict’ cooling energy. It’s already hard to do so for heating energy for low energy houses, but nearly impossible for cooling energy. All you can do – from a practical / system’s design perspective – is to make sure that there is an ‘infinite’ source of cooling energy available.

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[*] Edit: And it actually happenend in February 2017.