EWDataWarehouse

EWDataWarehouse is much more than just the database portion of EnergyWitness™. It is a facilities operations data warehouse that structures and manages operational data of all kinds, operational cost data, and space planning data. The organization and integration of these diverse data sources creates a warehouse that ultimately serves not only the facility's energy staff, but all other users (facilities teams, building and zone managers, financial personnel) with energy data needs for consumption, efficiency, and cost.

More than a Database ... a Data Warehouse

Warehouse Objects: EWDataWarehouse organizes data into six types of objects, each with the flexibility to be changed or expanded as needed. The object types interrelate to allow user-oriented configuration, for example, navigating through interval data by building.

Managing all the monitor and control points for your BAS(s), utilities, meters (even manually read meters) and weather data is just the start. EWDataWarehouse also centralizes billing information—every utility bill (for purchased utilities or those you generate) including bill determinants for purchased utilities and both bill and rate determinants for generated utilities. The whole purpose of the warehouse is to make information accessible by those who need it, whether it be the central power plant manager, an energy engineer, maintenance mechanic, or finance director. It needs to be fast and it needs to be useful to provide truly actionable information.

Making Data Useful

All the data in the world isn't very useful unless it's structured in a way that allows for fast, meaningful access and computation. We understand what data needs to be collected in the first place, and how to organize it for optimal retrieval. This organization takes the form of various warehouse objects—logical data components that define the information stored in the warehouse.

EnergyWitness makes it easy to add new information. Contextual menus allow new items to be added within any of the warehouse objects.

As shown in the chart above, there are six main objects. The top three defined the bulk of the data—both interval data and billing information. The others are primarily for organization, access control, and tracking issues. Adding new items is as easy as a right-click, as shown to the left, where you can see the object hierarchies.

The Interval Data object includes all the 15 minute interval data from BASs (and other OPC-accessible points), weather feeds (METAR data converted from hourly data), and calculations. The Facility object organizes the physical campus allowing users to navigate through zones, buildings, floors and rooms, and integrates standard HEGIS classifications. The Meter object includes utility billing information for all utility types (electricity, gas, water, steam, and chilled water), and manages the complex relationships between utilities, accounts, meters, rates, determinants and bills.

While the objects provide the overall structure, the data itself must be normalized to be useful. Normalization does two things, it synchronizes the data to 15 minute intervals, and removes any inconsistencies.

Normalizing the data handles cases where it is not available in 15 minute intervals. EWDataWarehouse reconciles these differences, whether due to a utility that only provides hourly or daily information, or dealing with a gap in data due to equipment failure. To handle these situations, EnergyWitness collects instantaneous, averaged, or totalized values as appropriate.

Storing data in a homogeneous form removes inconsistencies that make data hard to use or trends hard to compare. Points being monitored need to be in similar units of measure. For instance, if one device is measuring flow in gallons/second, and another in cubic feet/minute, the data needs to be translated to provide consistency, allow comparisons to make sense, and calculations to be correct.

Hourly cost of operations, calculated every 15 minutes, for each chiller and the overall cooling tower.

Calculations stored in EWDataWarehouse are nothing short of blow-your-socks-off great. It's the beauty of having all the data available and normalized to consistent intervals—you can perform any efficiency or measurement calculations. EWDataWarehouse performs and stores the calculated values at each interval, giving you the ability to see trends ranging from Delta T reports to overall cooling tower efficiency or chiller plant total hourly cost of operation. Think about it—you can get the total cost of running your chiller plant, shown in dollars/hour, recalculated every 15 minutes. And you can get it as quickly and easily as you can a simple chiller supply water temperature.

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