How do you incorporate an energy escalator of 3%?

Hello,

One of the projects that I worked on is requesting that I include an energy escalator of 3%. I assume that this means that every year, the price of energy increases 3%. How do I incorporate this into my model that was generated using Energy Plus/OpenStudio? Thank you in advance.

Typically, energy simulations are for a single year, so annual energy escalation wouldn't impact a single simulation. If you're trying to do a multi-year analysis of a flat rate tariff (as opposed to time-of-use), you can simply take the results from an annual simulation and increase the annual energy cost by 3% a year. A time-of-use rate increase would be more complicated, you would need to develop the entire time-of-use tariff using the UtilityCost:Tariff object. Alternatively, you can output hourly energy use for each fuel type and apply tariff rates manually in a spreadsheet.