I am working on a new construction project in California that required PV and battery per Title 24. Does this need to be accounted for in the energy model? Does anyone have experience incorporating battery into IES VE?
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Marcus Sheffer
LEED Fellow7group / Energy Opportunities
LEEDuser Expert
5906 thumbs up
October 8, 2023 - 11:07 am
All energy use associated with the project should be accounted for in the model. Not sure how to incorporate this into IES-VE but you don't actually have to do so. You can do these calculations outside the model and incorporate them into your results.
Jamy Bacchus
Associate PrincipalME Engineers
25 thumbs up
October 8, 2023 - 1:00 pm
I'll let Nathan and others at IES tell you how to add in the PVs and batteries since that's a paid software with support.
Having done this in software and via post-processing, I'll provide a few quick insights. If you're using flat electrical cost rates and/or flat GHG emissions factors, you lose with batteries or any thermal storage as the batteries will have an approx 5%-10% loss during each roundtrip cycle. Thus there's no energy cost or carbon arbitrage of buying low and selling high. You either never want to show the batteries being used (charged from the grid or PVs) or you will have to use a real rate tariff and/or hourly carbon emissions profile. I see this as a problem with ASHRAE 228-2023 and 240P that they both list an annualized yearly grid factor and therefore will never show any benefit of thermal or electrical storage unless it's >100% efficient on the return of that stored energy, which is you know is breaking a few laws as we know them.