Functional Testing Protocols for Commercial Building Efficiency Baseline Modeling Software

As advanced metering infrastructure including time-of-use and smart meter technology penetrates more and more buildings in utility service areas, an abundance of rich short-time interval data is becoming available. Software vendors are mining this data to provide energy management services to customers, establish energy baselines, and track performance over time.

The test protocols in this report were developed to guide testing of software products with baseline modeling and savings estimation functionality that may be used to estimate whole-building energy savings over a period of time. Savings measurement and verification (M&V) requires comparing the amount of energy actually used to the amount of energy the building would have used had energy efficiency measures not been implemented. The energy the building would have used cannot be measured; it must be estimated with a baseline model. The accuracy of the savings estimate is therefore directly dependent on the accuracy of the baseline model.