Design, simulation and analysis of a passive house and its renewable energy system for Newfoundland

A large amount of energy produced is directly consumed in the form of electricity. This need for energy is continuously growing and leading to new ways to make efficient use of it. When we talk about using energy efficiently, the idea of a passive house system kicks in, which essentially focuses on reducing energy use for space heating or cooling in a house. The main idea is to reduce the energy consumption of the house as well as reducing its impact on the environment when the occupants are using the house. The first phase of the research shows the dynamic modelling of an energy-efficient home that works on the principles and guidelines of a passive house using the EnergyPlus simulation engine. A renewable energy system has been developed for the passive house, which is located at Flat Rock, St John’s, NL Canada. The overall design has been simulated using MATLAB/Simulink environment packages. The dynamic simulation indicates that the system gives promising results. In the second phase, a detailed simulation of a renewable energy system using various software and efficient energy management techniques are presented. Finally, for experimental validation, an open-source IoT platform named Ubidots smart home automation is used as Human Machine Interface (HMI) server, an ESP32 Thing microcontroller board as a Master Logic Controller (MLC) where all sensors and output devices such as power meter, relays are connected for data acquisition and control