The New OEIS is Available!
May 2, 2017The Department of Utilities and Energy Services is pleased to announce the recent launch of phase one of the new Open Energy Information System (OEIS).
The first rendition of the OEIS, was first released over 13 years ago. With lofty goals of being a low cost, fully featured alternative to the energy information systems commercially available at the time, the project was a resounding success. When discussing technology, 13 years is an exceptionally long time, and the ages of the technologies behind OEIS were beginning to show at all levels of the system design. With newer smart meter and building technologies, many of the laborious processes of data collection now come built-in, but there was no way to take advantage of these new features given the former strict method of collection.
In 2007, Dr. Hitt released UCF’s President’s Climate Action Plan that highlighted goals and milestones to ultimately achieve carbon neutrality. In 2016, the Board of Trustees chartered the UCF Collective Strategic Impact Plan with charge to strengthen UCF’s commitment to healthy environments and sustainable practices in “everything it undertakes.”
Campus buildings represent UCF’s largest contributor of emissions. The department of Utilities and Energy Services took aim to adopt the strategies outlined in the UCF Collective Strategic Plan by integrating the OEIS with over 400 building utility sub meters and building automation BTU meter data to provide the campus population transparency in terms of consumption, and accountability with the UCF community, staff, students, operations, administration.
The OEIS is an engaging web-enabled interactive tool that provides contextualized real-time utility data on a building by building basis in an effort to reduce UCF’s energy consumption and carbon footprint. The system also provides an educational tool for the campus population and stakeholders to have a live look-in of the opportunities, risk and realities that face UCF’s building energy consumption.
The OEIS also provides key metrics regarding UCF’s high-performance building portfolio, campus energy projects, and conservation efforts. Users can compare buildings based on both site and source energy use, download building energy data, and view daily campus utility production utilization and output. The department is optimistic that this will also inspire a campus population to improve existing building campus sustainability in terms of conservation strategies, innovations, and technology. The division was able to avoid over $100,000 annually from service fees by developing and integrating these services internally.
Future phases of the OEIS will include improved dynamic charting, CO2 equivalents and other unit conversions, automatic calculation of baselines and savings for energy project measurement and verification, LEED certification details, energy and cost projections.
See more at http://oeis.ucf.edu/
