Proposed Guidelines For Using Energy Management And Control Systems For Performance Monitoring PDF Download

Monitoring of energy consumption and building operation are important parts of conservation savings analysis, although effective monitoring can be quite expensive. Energy management and Control Systems (EMCSS) contain all of the same equipment that is usually installed for monitoring, however, and can often be used for this application. Since EMCSs are installed in a growing number of commercial buildings, the addition of conventional energy monitoring equipment can be redundant. EMCSs are not designed with monitoring in mind, however. The characteristics of an EMCS are determined by the building's control needs rather than by monitoring needs, so EMCS-based monitoring can have several complicating factors. Differences between the EMCS models, the installed options at sites with the same model, or the degree of system utilization at a site can mean the difference between a system that can be used for monitoring immediately, and one that cannot be used at all. In instituting monitoring programs that include EMCSs as tools, guidelines defining procedures and the required system capabilities would be quite helpful. In this paper, we propose guidelines for EMCS monitoring, based on our evaluation of monitoring procedures in earlier case studies. These guidelines could be used to help in determining whether EMCSs can be used for monitoring at particular sites. The guidelines also discuss how to find out if the necessary elements are present, and what to do if these elements are not present. Finally, we discuss how these guidelines could be used in the development of the EMCS-based monitoring technology, and the advantages that could be realized through that development.