This video covers creation of a basic electric rate in eQuest, as well as how to save an electric rate that was edited in the detailed viewer by copying data from the .inp file.

In this video:

• Custom rates in the wizards
• Cumulative vs. Incremental
• Ratchets in the detailed view
• Saving a detailed rate from the .inp file

While eQUEST provides multiple electric and gas rates, inevitably you’re going to require a custom rate. In order to enter a custom rate on screen one of the wizard you can select the electric utility and select custom. What that is going to do is enable additional screens starting with screen 38.

In screen 38, we have the custom electric rate, which we can name, and we’ll give it a custom name. Perhaps we’ll give the name of the most important city in the country, Fargo, ND. (Sarcasm, but no offense Fargo) We’ll leave it at Block Charges and the Block Type is a nice feature in eQUEST that has incremental blocks or cumulative blocks. We leave it at cumulative, if it’s worded as such, up to 1000 kWh, up to 2000, up to 3000 and so on. We’ll stick with incremental blocks here. So let’s say the first 1000 kWh are $0.10 / kWh and all remaining, up to basically 100,000 are $0.06 / kWh. For demand, the block size is virtually unlimited for a small building, and we can say its $10.00 / kW. We could have a second season here, if for instance, summer had different rates than the winter. For simplicities sake, we’re going to keep it as is. Please note there’s a save icon in the upper right corner, however, we can only save rates that were created within the wizard. In this case we’re going to add a ratchet and see how we can save that, so we can use it in future models. From here we can finish the wizard, and once we click finish on the wizard, that will take us to the detailed interface and we’ll have to switch modes, by going to mode and selecting detailed data edit. From here we select our Fargo, ND rates. If we double click on it, we get a bunch of additional options. As we said we’re going to add a ratchet. From here we’re going to create one, and we’re simply going to call it, Fargo.

Then click done and now under the ratchets folder we’re going to have a Fargo ratchets, which we can double click on and edit. It applies to 12 months of the year, the highest peak demand, no offset by default and the ratchet fraction is a 1:1 ratio. The only thing we’re going to change is the ratio to 0.8. In other words if the month of July had 1000 kW as its peak and the month of November had 600 kW, November would still be charged for 80% of July, which was the peak usage Month, so it would be charged for 800 kW, even though it’s peak was only 600. That is what a ratchet does. And that of course applies to all 12 months of the year. So whatever your highest peak is, you’re going to pay at least 80% of that for the remaining months of the year. We can click done, and then save, but since we’ve made a change outside of the wizard, what happens when we wish to use this rate structure again. Well, we need to do some customization.

First, close out of eQUEST, we have to navigate to the eQUEST projects folder. Here we’re in a generic project and we have to find the .int file. We can open that with any text editor, because we’re going to copy and paste data into a new file. We recommend notepad++. From here we’re going to find the lock charge and the utility rate command. Simply use CTRL + F to bring up the finder window and type “utility rate”. Once we find “utility rate” as well as block charge, both typically near the bottom of the file. So I’m going to copy from the block charges line to the double period (..) at the end of the utility rates line. So we have block charges and utility rates. I’m going to right click, copy the selection and paste it into this new file. Once I have this copied and pasted we’ll effectively have a back up rate structure. You will want to make sure that you didn’t accidentally copy and paste any gas rate data, so under the utility rate, we to delete the utility gas rate, as well as the two periods that end the command. If there were any schedules used, those will also have to be copied and pasted from the .inp file. In this case, we have a ratchet that we should also include. So we can copy this, paste it into our new file at the very top and make sure to include the double period (..) to end the command.

Finally, we are going to delete the schedules, as they are non-custom and don’t need to be included, form here, we can save this new file and call it fargo, and save it in the appropriate folder. We have to go to the eQUEST data folder and save it into the rates folder, calling it fargo.txt. Then we navigate to that file and actually change its extension to .ert, for electric. For gas files, we would change the extension to .grt. We’ll skip to that folder location. Once we get to the rates folder, we can right click, click rename, or click F2, to rename and give it an .ert extension. From here open up eQUEST, once we have eQUEST open, we can start a new file in the schematic design wizard. Now having saved that file, if we select the electric rate under file, we’ll have the option with the same file name. Then select finish and wait for the wizard to complete. Once completed, click the utility and economics button, select the component tree and we’ll see the fargo rate, the SoCalGas GN-10 Gas rate, as well as the fargo ratchet, which we can double click and see it as we left it. While rate charts can get a lot more complicated, now you will always be able to save your custom rates.