8760 Load Profiles

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Hello all,

We're conducting a microgrid study for a campus-style facility and need to be able to aggregate the hourly loads of the campus buildings (various types and sizes) into a single load profile. I'm reaching out to gauge what the best sources are for typical 8,760 building load profiles (free or purchased). Ideally these would be broken out by end-use category, but that's not a strict requirement. At a minimum, I'd need the ability to pull a unique profile based on building use type and climate zone.

Thanks,

Coles Jennings PE, BEMP, LEED AP BD+C
Sr. Energy Engineer, Building Sciences Manager | Mason & Hanger
A Day & Zimmermann Company
D 804.521.7045 | O 804.285.4171 | F 804.217.8520
4880 Sadler Road, Suite 300 | Glen Allen, VA 23060
Mason & Hanger
We do what we say.(r)

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One approach I've done recently is to use a combination of the 8,760
profiles in HOMER PRO (you can get the profiles while using the free trial)
by building industry type (industrial, commercial, residential) and then
scale them to match the annual energy use determined from CBECS for the
specific building type and climate of your buildings. CBECS does have
energy broken out by end-use category, but this approach described above
won't tell you the 8,760 profiles of each end-use category.

Thanks,
Alex

Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2017 15:34:40 +0000
From: "Jennings, Coles via Bldg-sim"
To: "bldg-sim at lists.onebuilding.org"
Subject: [Bldg-sim] 8760 Load Profiles
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Hello all,

We're conducting a microgrid study for a campus-style facility and need to
be able to aggregate the hourly loads of the campus buildings (various
types and sizes) into a single load profile. I'm reaching out to gauge what
the best sources are for typical 8,760 building load profiles (free or
purchased). Ideally these would be broken out by end-use category, but
that's not a strict requirement. At a minimum, I'd need the ability to pull
a unique profile based on building use type and climate zone.

Thanks,

Coles Jennings PE, BEMP, LEED AP BD+C
Sr. Energy Engineer, Building Sciences Manager | Mason & Hanger
A Day & Zimmermann Company
D 804.521.7045 | O 804.285.4171 | F 804.217.8520
4880 Sadler Road, Suite 300 | Glen Allen, VA 23060
Mason & Hanger
We do what we say.(r)

*Alex N. Chapin, LEED AP BD+C, BEMP, LEED Project Reviewer*

*Principal*

*3R Building Sustainability*

www.3Rsustainability.com

achapin at 3Rsustainability.com

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One option is to use the reference building models used to test development
of ASHRAE Standard 90.1 and output 8760 hour end-use data. The models by
themselves do not output the 8760 data but it is a minor tweak to allow
them to do that. 18 building types available in 16 climate zones.
https://www.energycodes.gov/development/commercial/prototype_models

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Hello all,

I?ve gotten some great responses, both privately and on the public thread. I really appreciate the feedback from the group. The consensus definitely appears to be to use the DoE prototype buildings to create sample load profiles. For those that are not already aware, I located this database, which includes both commercial and residential 8,760 load profiles, broken out by end-use:

http://en.openei.org/datasets/dataset/commercial-and-residential-hourly-load-profiles-for-all-tmy3-locations-in-the-united-states

The commercial profiles are based on the DoE prototypes and have been run for just about every significant location in the US. Does anyone else have experience with this database?

My search continues for a repository of real, metered data to complement the simulation data. Modeling is always my first tool in the toolkit as well, but the more metered data I see coming back from our clients (which can take a lot of begging to get), the more I realize that some of the ?typical? profiles from standard modeling guidelines are a little more idealized than I used to think.

Thanks to all,

Coles Jennings PE, BEMP, LEED AP BD+C
Sr. Energy Engineer, Building Sciences Manager | Mason & Hanger
A Day & Zimmermann Company
D 804.521.7045 | O 804.285.4171 | F 804.217.8520
4880 Sadler Road, Suite 300 | Glen Allen, VA 23060
Mason & Hanger
We do what we say.?

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Dear Coles,
Quoting Dru Crawley (who got it elsewhere) "All models are wrong, but some
are useful". That applies doubly to instances where you want to match
metered data with modeled data.

As I participate in both the modeling and commissioning arenas, I'm keenly
aware of the (literally) hundreds of ways a building can operate
differently than imagined by the modeler (or DOE's reference models).
Differences are often major!

The scenario you describe appears to be what a statistician would describe
as "under-constrained" - you probably don't know enough details about
actual operation to understand which of several low RSME calibration
solutions are correct. :(

At the risk of blathering on too long, I think your project places you on
the leading edge of energy practice and research; good luck!

p.s., there are some nifty software tools which promise effective analysis
of buildings with BMS'. Among them are SkySpark
and a few others, with newcomer BuildPulse
. Their approach is to apply FDD rule sets and
identify operational problems.
Another nifty tool is the (totally) wire-free CT sensors from Panoramic
Power , which we've used for sub-metering complex
facilities.

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I like calibrating to whatever you can get. If you are talking about
aggregate loadshapes, like I'm usually working with when consulting with
utilities, then calibrating to whole facility data can be quite
enlightening. In general, an average of existing real building loads looks
a lot different than the output you might get from the prototypes. After
you mess with schedules (keep your calibration loose), then the resulting
profiles can be quite a bit better. The primary difference that we see is
that real buildings use a lot more electricity at night and on weekends
than their prototypes suggest. Yes, you are guessing which end uses are
off, but if you have hourly data across multiple seasons and types of
weather, then you should be able to make some good guesses that would
represent improvements on the prototypes. Don't overdo it. You still don't
know very much.

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[sorry to those getting this twice, CC?ed the wrong mailing list in reply]

My contribution will echo with Justin?s:

Your first and best source of what the load profiles look like in aggregate for a given site is whatever you can come up with from the utilities and any upstream campus submeters / logs. Before running down the path of ?building up? to what?s seen at the bills and campus meter(s), establish how far you can get looking at this from the ?top down.? I would try to constrain a prototype-driven ?build up? exercise to only providing a loose context to what might make up what?s actually being measured in aggregate. With some luck, you might find interval data exists which isn?t otherwise published or shared out by the utility campus metering folks.

If you (or your client) have any purpose-built models developed already to evaluate/calibrate against existing bills, I?d would definitely consider leveraging those before falling back to from-scratch DOE reference models.

Time/resources spent making a guess ?from scratch? might be better invested exploring options to add some logging/metering to get some real insight into what the aggregate profile really looks like, even if only for a short period.

~Nick

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Bldg-Sim?ers,

I?m getting on this thread a little late and I am not sure whether this was brought up already.
I?d suggest looking at ASHRAE RP-1093 that generated typical load shapes (diversity factors) for commercial buildings.
The Final Report is available on ashrae.org. The work was done a while ago (2000).

Thanks

Bass

Bass Abushakra, Ph.D., CEM

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