Hi Coles - that is a tricky one!
It's been awhile since I've revisited the capabilities of the DD wizards for handling complex rate structures, and I'm pleasantly surprised to find some improvements in the native capabilities. (screengrabs follow). That is in fact a pretty wacky structure from my personal experience, but while it appears you can define/map up to 5 billing periods per day and then assign those to specific week days / holidays, I don't think you can do monthly maximum checks between each period to accurately determine billable demand within the eQUEST interface - some degree of post-processing seems unavoidable to me.
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2 major thoughts:
1. If it were me, I'd still keep an eye/ear out for a more promising contribution/reply, but in the meantime I'd just push forward with post processing your hourly outputs with excel to determine costs. If you've done this before, this oddball formula doesn't pose a terribly difficult challenge to implement (all the needed hourly outputs & month/day/hour flags are conveniently packaged in the default "... - Hourly Results.csv" reporting block borne from wizard-generated projects). Since I've moved into the performance contracting world (and had to puzzle with with getting complex rate tariffs *right* on the regular) - I've come to embrace, even enjoy, the absolute flexibility that comes with determining costs outside of the eQUEST, even with the relative pains that come with needing to use a separate process to figure out where the dollars/cents lie during development.
2. On close inspection of that formula I notice something interesting... for each month:
if(The peak peak demand > the peak interim demand) .AND. (peak interim demand > peak base demand))
then the billable demand is simply the monthly peak (i.e. the rest of the formula zeroes itself out)!
else see major thought #1 above - it was worth a check =(
endif
You might set up a couple checks for this at the top of whatever spreadsheet you use to number-crunch the hourly results. If the above checks both turn out to be true for each month, you can simply use the eQuest's native monthly peaks/costs as reported as the billable demand, using a very simple single-TOU demand rate structure.
Best of luck - I hope you'll consider sharing whatever approach you land on (and everyone else dealing with Mexico)! If there's a trick to be learned to handle this within eQUEST or commandline doe2, I'm certainly all ears!
~Nick
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Nick Caton, P.E.
Senior Energy Engineer
Energy and Sustainability Services
Schneider Electric
D 913.564.6361
M 785.410.3317
E nicholas.caton at schneider-electric.com
F 913.564.6380
15200 Santa Fe Trail Drive
Suite 204
Lenexa, KS 66219
United States
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