Enabling Detailed Energy Analyses via the Technology Performance Exchange: Preprint
One of the key tenets to increasing adoption of energy efficiency solutions in the built environment is improving confidence in energy performance. Current industry practices make extensive use of predictive modeling, often via the use of sophisticated hourly or sub-hourly energy simulation programs, to account for site-specific parameters (e.g., climate zone, hours of operation, and space type) and arrive at a performance estimate. While such methods are highly precise, they invariably provide less than ideal accuracy due to a lack of high-quality, foundational energy performance input data. The Technology Performance Exchange was constructed to allow the transparent sharing of foundational, product-specific energy performance data, and leverages significant, external engineering efforts and a modular architecture to efficiently identify and codify the minimum information necessary to accurately predict product energy performance. This strongly-typed database resource represents a novel solution to a difficult and established problem. One of the most exciting benefits is the way in which the Technology Performance Exchange's application programming interface has been leveraged to integrate contributed foundational data into the Building Component Library. Via a series of scripts, data is automatically translated and parsed into the Building Component Library in a format that is immediately usable to the energy modeling community. This paper (1) presents a high-level overview of the project drivers and the structure of the Technology Performance Exchange; (2) offers a detailed examination of how technologies are incorporated and translated into powerful energy modeling code snippets; and (3) examines several benefits of this robust workflow.