These questions are particularly applicable to large buildings and campuses of buildings with complex mechanical systems where significant demand reductions may be possible. When vast amounts of real-time data derived from the ongoing commissioning of a building’s systems are analyzed and correlated with real-time energy consumption data, a number of strategies can be employed to optimize the building and payments from electricity markets. By correlating control system data with data from networked switchgear and meters (Figure 1), more granular control over these systems becomes possible.
Many techniques are currently used to temporarily reduce the electrical load of buildings, including turning off subsystems (lighting, heating, cooling, fans), adjusting temperature setpoints in building spaces, employing energy storage systems (ice or chilled water storage, etc.), and dispatching back-up or emergency generation units.
In conjunction with new business practices enabled by technologies such as Cimetrics’ Infometrics, ongoing commissioning service, mechanical, electrical, and control systems behavior can be studied in order to select and optimize the sheddable load in buildings without compromising mission critical activities. The analysis of actual building performance during DR events over time can lead to improvement of the buildings’ response to such events.