I would like to import utility rates into my project, the software says that there is an energyplus measure that is available to import utility rates. Where is this located and how do I use it?
The Xcel EDA Tariff Selection and Model Setup measure can be used to add energy cost to the outputs. Download the measure from the BCL to your My Measures directory which can be set from the Preferences menu in OpenStudio.
The utility rates used by the measure are contained in EnergyPlus IDF files (one for each tariff) located in the resources folder. These can be opened in EnergyPlus' IDF Editor or a text editor and changed to other utility rates. See the Economics section of the Input Output Reference for documentation of these objects.
For example, the $0.11/kWh summer on peak rate from the Commercial.idf can be changed to reflect a different utility's tariff.
UtilityCost:Charge:Simple,
CommercialSummerOnPeakEnergyCharge, !- Name
Commercial, !- Tariff Name
peakEnergy, !- Source Variable
summer, !- Season
EnergyCharges, !- Category Variable Name
0.11; !- Cost per Unit Value or Variable Name
We are working on a more generic utility tariff measure. It will likely expose arguments for the user to enter rate information so they don't have to edit the resource IDF manually.
David should be posting this to BCL in the next day or so.
As @ljbrackney mentioned we have been working on a variety of tariff measures to support different use cases. We created a Utility Rate Tariff Documentation page that describes how they can each be used.
Search for 'tariff' on BCL to see the four new measures. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback about this. OpenStudio 1.8.1 due out soon will contain a new default results reporting measure that show lifecycle costs based on tariffs along with other life cycle costs that may be in your model.
What happened to v1.8.0? Purgatory?
We do have 1.8.0 installers on GitHub but they are not on our main page yet. We will put it on the main page, but needed to clean up the installers a bit first. 1.7.5 and 1.8.0 are pretty similar, both use Energy Plus 8.3. 1.8.0 address a but related to reporting time series data.
The new reporting measure wasn't ready in time to put in 1.8.0, so you will have to get 1.8.1 for that, which hopefully will be ready sometime next week. More new features will also appear in later 1.8.x iteration installers.
Not so much purgatory as vacation - Alex has been out, but the link on the main page will be updated early next week.
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