The brewery I am modeling has large percentage of energy consumption associated with the process load. From past posts I understand I need to write a thorough narrative explaining the standard practive baseline and the stategy for energy savings of process load for the Proposed Case.
We have the energy data of MBTUs/barrel from World Breweries Energy Benchmarking and MBTU/barrel calculated from another very similar brewery of the same company in another location. My questions are:
1. Can I use this MBTUs/barrel comparison to demonstrate the savings of process load of the Proposed Case from the Baselin Case for this project (by applying a percentage of process load to the total consummption)?
2. I am using Trane Trace for energy modeling. The process load added in the energy model is typically just a number under "Base Utilities". I am thinking using a total number for both baseline and proposed case based on MBUTs/barrel and the barrel production of this new brewary. Is that enough?
3. There are many chillers associated with only the process load . Should I model it in my energy model? (e.g. selecting chiller types, assign capacity and efficiency, etc) or just take them as a part of the lump sum number of process load?
Marcus Sheffer
LEED Fellow7group / Energy Opportunities
LEEDuser Expert
5909 thumbs up
November 7, 2012 - 5:58 pm
1 and 2 are not nearly enough in my opinion. While the approach you describe is minimally acceptable for traditional process loads in many building types it is not nearly adequate when the calculation of the savings comes into play. You need to explicitly model the specific process loads.
NOTICE - preaching to the choir zone ahead . . . (also not meant to pick on just you Xun Jia)
Non-regulated process loads are too often either assumed or ignored by too many projects. Even marginally good modeling practice would be to model these loads as accurately as possible and not by entering "just a number" in the model. This often requires asking the owner to tell you the nature of those loads beyond figuring out electrical capacity. If the owner does not know then help them to figure it out. Just because it is not regulated and you are not designing the system does not mean that you should ignore the energy saving potential of these end uses in the spirit of LEED.
Move your thinking beyond the minimum.