Well-Defined
Quantifiable
Objective
Repeatable
and it is very obvious that so called IQ tests meet none of these with great certainty - though they do point towards a fairly well defined skill-set (that is not intelligence - can you "practice" for intelligence?)
So is it a bit flamboyant to name ourselves kWIQly. The kW aspect is obvious and the "ly" is as in quickLY - but where do we get the "IQ"?
In this post we will see if we can come up with a definition of Building Energy Intelligence that is meaningful as a metric and fits the criteria listed above. Most important it must be OBJECTIVE - we may suggest it, but we cannot claim it . Why ? - because metrics are simply ideas - which are good to share !
Lets look at some professional metrics...
BTW wikipedia : Profession provides a nice definition from which we can know that stockbrokers and footballers are examples of what professions aren't !
Account - The Books Balance
Doctor - The Patient Survives
Architect - The Building Stands
Energy Manager - ?? - erm Energy is like kinda "managed" I guess.
So long as we don't know if energy is "managed" - we cannot even provide a pass/fail let alone a performance metric.
Taking this from another angle energy is used for various purposes. If the purpose is known and necessary, (eg heating a cubic meter of dry air by 1 Celsius) we know how much energy it takes (Laws of Physics) if done optimally. If we know the efficiency of the process we can predict from the task the energy that is to be used.
So ultimately, if we know what we are doing, and can justify these things - we know how much energy it should take to do it. Nice simple idea.
We argue that in so far as an energy manager knows what must be achieved he can predict how much energy it should take given his available facilities. Otherwise the energy manager does not know either "what he or she is doing" or "how efficiently it is being done".
We suppose the first metric for Building Energy Intelligence should be the Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) between primary energy consumption and that predicted at a particular time resolution (eg daily).
To standardize this value is simple (divide MAD / Mean power), and it can easily be applied to benchmarking (per sqft in hospitals etc)
It has been said before that - "you can't manage what you can't measure", but measuring is not managing, and measurement for measurement sake is futile.
Measurements should build on a grasp of the activities occurring and expected (or unexpected) in a building, and the implications that these measurements have. To the extent that energy is managed the implications are known and documented - and it can be said that there is a degree of "Building Energy Intelligence"
