Sub-metering and advanced metrics: save time, money, energy, and prevent lost research!

Matthew Gudorf, UC Irvine
Christopher Hartley, MelRok LLC

The utility industry in many parts of the world is changing how it bills customers for their energy use. The focus is shifting from total consumption to how much, how fast, and when energy is being consumed. Energy is neither bought nor sold in kBTU/SqFt; although a worthy design metric, it does little for operating labs as economically as possible. The University of California, Irvine partnered with MelRok, LLC to examine how The Cloud, Big Data Analytics, and new energy use metrics can quickly identify and convert problems with energy waste into energy saving victories. In addition, weather, utility tariff, and operating data can be used to optimize energy use, find hidden capacity, prevent inadvertent outages, and reduce cost.

Meters, sub-meters, and BMS/EMS systems all provide copious amounts of data. At a fundamental level, operational and energy data allows for the calculation, trending, and display of energy versus various timescales. Previously this data would be normalized for weather and occupancy and compared to historical data with the goal of using less energy each year. Advanced metrics move beyond timescale tabulation providing three new fractions of energy that can be targeted.

1. Active Lab Energy Use vs. Total Lab Energy Use
2. Non Active Lab Energy use vs. Total Lab Energy Use
3. Weekend/Holiday Energy use vs. Total Lab Energy Use

To better understand the fractional energy use demand distribution profiles show when the most energy is being required, and what percent of the time the lab spends at various loads. Histograms are used to display when and how often maximum demand events are occurring in a laboratory building. Weather and energy data are also be coupled together to calculate heating and cooling system efficiencies, as well as conduct weather normalization.

Sub-metering also allows lab managers and facilities to delve deeper into their energy use, and generate actionable information. Monitoring breaker capacity can prevent a circuit breaker trip before it occurs, saving valuable research and data. This can also save institutions the expense of running additional circuits when existing capacity can be identified. Monitoring the emergency circuit's load ensures the generator is able to handle the load when an outage does occur. Both of these instances can be displayed as a distribution, load duration curve, and profile plot. Energy reporting at this level can be replicated to include all of the previous analysis on a circuit level. These metrics and reports provide more insight and actionable information than a simple kBTU/SqFt.

Learning Objectives

  • Participants will identify new metrics for energy utilization with respect to operations of laboratory buildings. The metrics will provide insight into cost, and reliability that can be reviewed on a day, week, month, or yearly basis.
  • Given example data and analysis participants will compare non-actionable and actionable information and distinguish the characteristics' of each.
  • Participants will be able to utilize the hardware and software solutions presented by UC Irvine in combination with metrics appropriate to their institution to augment their existing systems.

Biographies:

Matt Gudorf has led UC Irvine's energy management group for the last 4 years. He is a graduate of The Ohio State University with a degree in Electrical Engineering and a Certified Energy Manager. The culmination of his leadership has been record breaking energy efficiency project completion under the UC/CSU/IOU Energy Efficiency Partnership in 2012 and 2013. Matt's work as the Campus Energy Manager has focused on all aspects of energy management.

Christopher Hartley is the Senior Energy Engineer at MelRoK, Inc with four years of experience in energy analysis and audits of commercial and institutional buildings. A graduate of the University of California, Irvine with a Masters degree in Environmental Engineering with an Emphasis in Energy, Christopher has worked for MelRoK developing the algorithms used in "Holistic Energy Assessment." He is also working concurrently on obtaining his California PE license.

 

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