SOFTWARE TOOL DEVELOPMENT (DESTEM
)The effort of our project was to bring together three different elements into one trying to achieve an enhanced Energy Management process that takes into account factors as Embodied Energy (E.E), Gas emissions and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
We implemented this envisage by developing a software tool that combine the demand profiles of a building, the calculation of the Embodied Energy of an implemented Energy Management option in the building and the production of two sustainability indicators that can be a part of an LCA.
DESTEM is developed on Excel 97 spreadsheet as we found Excel a good environment for integrating simple programming rules, underlying databases and a graphical interface.
The main feature of this tool that cannot be found is that it calculates the Embodied energy of an implemented change. This result is relevant and not an absolute as the calculation procedure considers the whole embodied energy of the building as the zero level and takes into account the E.E of any change in it. For the calculations of the E.E the tool use a database sourced from EcobalanceŽ, which is a credible European organisation, leader in the research of E.E. Data only about the E.E of the manufacturing process was used for the calculation so further development of the tool can be done if data for the energy used for the transportation will be enrich the existing database.
It must be clear that the developed tool is not calculating the savings of an Energy Management implementation but its operation and use begins having these energy figures estimated by the user through other existing tools.
There are two main screens for the data input, data concerning the building characteristics (floor area, occupancy location, type of the building, etc.) and its energy profile. Then the tool is divided in three main option differentiated by the capital cost of the selected Energy management implementation. Each investment category consists of several Energy Management options that enable the user to have a quite wide range of choices to investigate and compare. Some of the options are available in this phase of the tool and others are not. The activated options are ticked on their left side and that means that sufficient data concerning the E.E are available in order for the calculations to be implemented.
The environmental part of the DESTEM is directly related to EMISCAL, an emissions calculation tool created at the University of Strathclyde by a former postgraduate student. Through this tool all the calculations concerning the CO2 emissions are made(Download EMISCAL).
The tool calculates the Normalised Performance Indicator (NPI) of the described building before the Energy Management implementation, the NPI after the implementation but without taking into account the E.E of the implemented change and finnaly the Energy Index that is a modified form of the NPI but with the E.E of the implemented change participating in its calculation and the Environmental Index that is an Index for the evaluation of the environmental performance of the building based on the same basis as NPI. The only assumption made for the calculation of the NPI's is that the buildings are considered "normal" as far as the exposure factor is concerned. For the evaluation of this set of indicators, that are the results of the tool, the Energy Efficiency Ratings published by the Energy Efficiency Office (EEO) are used in addition to the Environmental Ratings that our team has created with the help of EMISCAL.
Through this set of indicators a good evaluation of the selected Energy management option can be made from a more sustainable point of view as the factors of E.E and environmental impact are taken into account. By this way DESTEM enables the decision making of Energy Management process to choose more sustainable options for its implementation.
NOTES FOR CORRECT USE
IMPORTANT: DESTEM cannot provide environmental results without downloading EMISCAL