The fundamental approach to energy monitoring, targeting and reporting (MT&R) involves determining what factors will have an influence on energy use (or production), typically recorded by an energy meter. These factors are sometimes referred to as “drivers” or “factors of influence” (e.g. weather, production level, occupancy). For a building heated with a natural-gas-fired boiler, the driver will typically be the heating requirements expressed as the number of heating degree-days. For a building with air-conditioning loads and an electric chiller, the driver is often cooling degree-days. And the drivers for an industrial plant might be the production level for a particular manufactured product, while for a photovoltaic power system, the driver would likely be the amount of solar radiation hitting the solar collectors each day.

The RETScreen Performance Analysis Module has a Data Worksheet that enables the user to create, import, calculate, filter, merge and store various datasets needed to prepare the analysis of the project.

Key to successful application of MT&R is the availability of a consistent set of accurate historical and current environmental data. The NASA Langley Research Centre has developed an automated database of satellite-derived daily values of surface meteorological parameters for a 25+ year period and in near real-time, for the entire surface of the planet. Parameters include, for example, daily temperature from July 1983 to present with a maximum delay of one week relative to real-time. The RETScreen user is able to automatically download historical and near real-time data from NASA’s web servers and directly upload it into this data section of the Performance Analysis Module. This makes weather-related data collection a simple task for projects anywhere in the world.

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