A Comprehensive Energy Monitoring Environment for District Energy Grid Systems

By conducting active meter monitoring and performance analysis for the buildings and the plants at the main campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology, it is possible for campus facilities managers to achieve significant efficiency improvements. A key challenge, however, is gathering and making sense of the large volumes of utilities data. In response, a comprehensive web-based building and plant energy-monitoring environment is presented that collects data from multiple energy grids. From the gathered data, particular attention is given to heating, cooling, and ventilation to assess building and ultimately campus energy performance through various analytics. First, techniques for data gathering, organization, and filtering are described, followed by several novel metrics and ways of visualizing them via a comparative method. Data filtering and classification strategies have also been implemented into a framework capable of evaluating a fleet of buildings with respect to a data-driven or model-driven baseline. The resulting monitoring system is shown to reduce the number of variables that campus managers of campus utilities and facilities need to track and make it more obvious where energy efficiency opportunities exist across a large fleet of buildings. Implications and future extensions of the monitoring platform are discussed