Benefits of creating a Baseline Consumption Model for your Building Portfolio
If you manage a large portfolio of buildings, you might be wondering how to define an accurate baseline for each one. A baseline helps you track energy use and set goals for reducing consumption.
But if you are still manually generating baselines for each building, it can be a time-consuming and error-prone process. Fortunately, there is a better way: you can now automatically generate baselines for your entire building portfolio using Dexma’s Bulk Baseline Generator.
In this blog post, we will show you why it is important to automatically generate baselines for your buildings to start saving energy and how to do it using Dexma’s Bulk Baseline Generator.
Why is it important to have a Baseline Model?
A baseline model is a formula that explains a building’s consumption against which you can measure progress or results. It represents your building's energy consumption over a set period of time, usually one year.
By comparing your building's real consumption to its baseline consumption, you can see how your building is performing over time. Replicate this through your portfolio and you can track the energy savings across all your organisation.
There are many reasons why it's important to have a baseline:
1) Baseline models help you track progress toward energy reduction goals. If you are trying to reduce your energy use by 10% over the next year, having a baseline will allow you to see if you're on track to reach that goal.
2) Baseline models can take into account the context variables of your building that can influence energy consumption such as external temperature, degree days data, occupancy, and production… Using these variables in the model will augment its accuracy compared to using the previous year's consumption.
3) Baseline models can adapt to the situation of your building: if the normal operation of your building is altered in any way (after-hours event, maintenance works…) that can influence energy consumption, your baseline can reflect this so that you can still track your savings accurately.
There are many other reasons we could think of, but these are just a few of the most important ones. In short, having a baseline is essential for any serious effort to improve energy efficiency.
What does it take to create a good Baseline Consumption Model?
You will need at least one year of historical data to take into account seasonality for the building consumption and for any variable that might influence it such as temperature, degree days, occupancy, and production...
The most important variables are:
Temperature: The heating (or cooling) demand is strongly influenced by the ambient temperature. For example, if it is cold outside, more energy will be required for heating purposes; conversely, if it's hot outside more energy will be required for cooling purposes. The weather forecast can give you an indication of how much heating/cooling demand may occur during different seasons or weather conditions.
Degree Days: Degree Days are defined as the number of degrees Celsius above or below a fixed base temperature. They indicate how much heating or cooling is needed over time in order to reach thermal comfort inside buildings. They are automatically calculated in Dexma.
Why you should automatically generate Baselines for your entire Building Portfolio:
Traditionally a baseline is calculated using a spreadsheet....