Now this runs through a simulation, and what this is doing is running a fake building with all the good details of glass percentage of a typical building, the schedules, lighting, and so on — all of that to create an hourly load. Before we look any further, I’ve already completed this project, and I created the monthly load profile, and the hourly load profile. Let’s just go ahead and look at the chart here.

So when I talk about hourly loads, there’s the building’s cooling and heating requirements by hour, for every day of the year. We could get into more detail on that — it’s not truly every day of the year, but close enough for our intents and purposes. You can see we hit our 1,000 tons, and this would be in July. We hit our equivalent of 1,000 tons, which is 1200 MBH, in December at the very end of the year.

You can also see that sometimes we have both cooling and heating, but this is what the hourly load profile looks like. You can see each one of these peaks occurs every single day, and then at night, when the building becomes unoccupied, the load drastically reduces for cooling. For heating it even decreases slightly, because we’re probably not ventilating the building as much at night.

These are all things that, in a typical whole building energy model, you have to enter all of the details — windows, lights, miscellaneous loads, walls, building size, number of people, ventilation — all of that, to get this data, which is seen by the plan. Chiller plant analyzer says, hey, we understand these patterns, and if we can specify the peaks, we can develop a good enough hourly load profile to evaluate chiller plant options.