ECAM (Energy Charting & Metrics)
ECAM: An Excel-Based Tool for Finding and Measuring Energy Savings
Current version downloads and links
Download unsupported beta version. For more information on the changes see: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/energy-charting-metrics-ecam-bill-koran/
Bill Koran conceived and created ECAM, and continues to lead new improvements. Gina Hicks implemented many of the most recent features and made ECAM more robust and easier to learn.
This tool was created with partial funding by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, New Buildings Institute, the California Commissioning Collaborative, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the (Pacific Northwest) Regional Technical Forum, and the Bonneville Power Administration.
The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) has contributed significantly to recent ECAM development. Recent new features funded by BPA include further automation and additional charts to support Strategic Energy Management, improvements to data resampling to better handle energy data as well as power data, and more flexible ways to organize the data for modeling. BPA also funded the updating of the User Guide to include the new features as well as previously undocumented features.
Improvements currently being funded by BPA include automated downloads of historical and TMY3 weather data, an all-fuels model, statistical identification of changes in energy use behavior, identification and handling of outlier points, and additional M&V model checking and guidance. Improvements in the estimation of energy savings uncertainty will also be part of the next ECAM release.
Key Features
ECAM meets most M&V needs for IPMVP Options A, B, or C, using these features:
- Uses both monthly billing data and interval meter data for IPMVP Option C. We are not aware of another tool that provides this capability.
- Incoporates logger data for IPVMP Options A and B.
- Enables development of a baseline model, and obtains agreement about the baseline before a project is started, reducing contention about performance.
- Provides charts to show whether energy use is changing during the baseline period, after accounting for weather and occupancy.
- ECAM can often greatly reduce M&V costs by permitting the use of data from permanent meters instead of data loggers.
- Contains flexible day typing and other capabilities to improve baseline and post-project modeling.
- Simplifies normalizing savings to an annual basis using typical weather.
Reduce Energy Engineering Time and Costs
ECAM supports the DOE-funded Building Re-tuning process with automated charts. In addition, its flexibility simplifies deep data analysis, including filtering or organizing to diagnose faults.
ECAM includes functions that make it easy to import utility interval meter data and integrate data gathered at different time intervals, including change-of-value (COV) data.
The analysis and modeling capabilities facilitate optimization, such as determining the optimum chilled water supply temperature supplied from a central plant under differing conditions of load and weather.
ECAM automates many tasks that are commonly performed by energy engineers and analysts:
- Creating occupancy schedules
- Creating day types
- Normalizing data by square foot or other indices
- Calculating various metrics, such as kW/ton or watts/CFM.
- Automating additional types of charts.
As an MS Excel application, ECAM gives users the flexibility needed to handle unusual situations. It allows users complete control to perform additional analyses and custom format reports.
Many Types of Charts
- Time series
- X-Y (scatter)
- Daily load profile
- 3D (chart of daily load profiles for multiple days) and Surface (3D chart in plain view, of daily load profiles using color as a proxy for value)
- Calendar (chart of daily load profiles laid out as a calendar)
- Load profiles as grouped box plots
- Load-duration chart
- X-Y chart of hourly or daily data and associated energy models, plus charts of model residuals
For more information or an ECAM demonstration, contact Michael Baker via email or phone (425) 827-0330.