Question

Mookodi Enterprise is a business consultancy with 543 employees. They are based in the north of Johannesburg on a 10Ha campus. Mookodi connects to the national grid at 11kV and pays a seasonal industrial low voltage (LV) tariff of 141.67 cents in summer and 165.94 cents in winter. Thirty percent of Mookodi’s employees are based at their clients’ offices and are not permanently based on the campus.

The campus has the following buildings:

• Canteen (Purple)
• Welcome Centre, Gym and Conference Centre (Green)
• Guardhouse (Light blue)
• Main Office Building 1 (Maroon)
• Main Office Building 2 (Dark blue)

Below is the campus’ electricity consumption over the last year:

MONTH	TOTAL KWH	ACTUAL BILL	DIFFERENCE
January	218980	220000	0%
February	220721	242000	-9%
March	227258	223000	2%
April	241226	245000	-2%
May	236821	245000	0%
June	262960	267078	-2%
July	300857	298047	1%
August	246849	245399	1%
September	222451	225476	-1%
October	208031	209000	0%
November	215118	219000	-2%
December	219604	215000	2%

QUESTION 1

discus what activities would you undertake to determine an energy efficiency baseline?

Answer 1

Having a baseline will help us to compare year to year energy consumption performance.To determine a baseline we need to undertake following activities.

1.Determining what is in and what is out is the first activity we need to do prior to establish a base line. Here in this case, there is no need to take any energy consumption cases outside the campus.So campus is a boundary within which we will determine the base line.

If it is needed to include the other office buildings to the baseline calculations, energy data of such buildings have to be added to the boundary energy data.

2.Setting a baseline year

We have prevous year's data of energy consumption. So we choose that year as the base year. Always choose an year with proper monthwise data is available.

3.Collecting the energy data

As provided in the question, we need a energy data for the year for which we have fixed the base year. Normally the month wise data is required as quarter wise data gives less idea about the change in consumption.

So segmentation is better than aggregated values to get accurate information. Here we have month wise data.

4.Calculating the energy intensity

For calculating the energy intensity, we should consider certain factors which can affect energy consumption. It can be outside atmospheric temperature of a office building or product demand in case of a manufacturing plant. Here in this case factors are related to season(Summer/Winter)

Having a model with above mentioned actors are needed to effectively determine energy intensity.For the normal model, we will consider coefficient of determination as 0.8 with a coeffienct of variation of 0.2.

5.Projecting the model using a software or simply excel.

Here having a projections will help us to add next year values to the model to find the change in performance easily. So add monthwise data along with affecting factor information and leave space for next year data for comparison.

So first we need to identiy the boundary upon which calculations are carrying out. Second selecting an year as the base year for which energy consumption data is available. Then we need to collate this data, make it in to a model along with addition of certain factors which affects the consumption level.At the end, all the data must be added in to a software/Excel for easy comparison of next year data. These are the activities we usually do for the determination of energy efficiency baseline.