New electric meters, software use provide glimpse at AEDC power consumption

  • Published
  • By Patrick Ary
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  AEDC workers are excited about tapping into a system recently installed on base to give everyone a glimpse of how much power the base is consuming.

The system developed in ATA's Information Technology department is taking advantage of a new system used to transmit the readings from electric meters on base buildings.

Automated meters were installed in October on more than 100 AEDC buildings, including office buildings and test facilities. The Air Force has spent $90 million to install the new meters at its bases to ensure compliance with the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

At AEDC, the meters transmit readings wirelessly every 15 minutes to a system located in the base's Power Control facility.

"We want to see what we use, because it's hard to reduce your consumption without knowing how much you're using," said ATA energy program manager John McInturff. "It also lets us monitor the effects in a building if we make changes. For example, how much did it reduce if we change out the lighting or if we add a load into a building? It just lets us monitor and see."

Currently, the system is available only in the Power Control building. But soon, that data could be available to anyone on base with a new series of reports that breaks the data down into a readable format.

Steve Mayes, the team lead for Enterprise Warehouse Information Systems, and Carol Cox, the section manager of Enterprise Information Systems and Support, got together and came up with the idea for the system after looking over an energy conservation newsletter from ATA Deputy General Manager Steve Pearson. It contained energy graphs that were put together by employees in Power Control.

"The guys in Power Control did a great job putting together the consumption charts for Steve Pearson's energy newsletters," Mayes said. "Carol and I brainstormed about how we could help them out with our enterprise reporting tool. If we could get to the data, then we could develop energy consumption reports that would be readily available online with the click of a mouse.

"When we discussed the possibility with Mr. Pearson, he was excited about the possibilities and sponsored the effort to move forward. We also discussed the report concept with our Air Force Communications Branch counterparts and with the AEDC Civil Engineering community. With their support and understanding of the benefits of this information, we obtained the necessary approvals to begin report development."

The software, Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI), is used to report information from multiple information systems at AEDC through the base's data warehouse. It has a wide variety of uses on base - and now it can be used to report energy usage.

"We pull the usage data into the data warehouse and report it any way that adds value to the center," Cox said. "You can manipulate the data in terms of how you display it, whether you look at summary-level information, detailed information and so on. By creating the energy usage reports, consumption and conservation measures become visible to the base population at a minimal cost."

With the software and data, energy reports can be generated to see how much power is used in buildings throughout the day. It's capable of getting the information every 15 minutes, but for the sake of keeping it simple it is currently monitored by the hour in the reports.

All of this was accomplished at no additional cost to the base, outside of the labor that went into setting up the reports in OBI.

"There was no additional cost," Mayes said. "It was just a question of priorities."

Cox said the reports have a potential for huge savings at AEDC, as the base moves toward more energy conservation projects.

"This will give us the ability to see a before and after shot of pre-conservation and post-conservation measures," she said. "For example, there is currently a project that's going to kick off pretty soon to install new light panels in one of AEDC's existing buildings. By having the availability of the metered data using the old lights today, as soon as the new light panels are installed, we will be able to see if there's a decrease in the energy consumption in that building. So we can see right away if it saves money and whether it's something we should look at doing in other buildings."

There are still some hurdles to overcome. Because the meter system is transmitting on a wireless network, it is affected by weather conditions like heavy rain and cold weather. McInturff said depending on conditions, the time between readings may be from several hours to a couple of days.

"We'll have a big spike and the data kind of rolls all together," McInturff said. "That's the biggest issue right now. We're not getting the reliability on the readings that we would like."

The wireless meter network also is currently closed off from the rest of the base network for security reasons. Information is put into the OBI system from a hard copy. McInturff said options are being explored to beat these issues, including hard-wiring the meter network.

Whatever options are taken to deal with those issues, the data is still being collected. And with the OBI system, it will be around for a long time to help AEDC workers find ways to make the base more energy-efficient.

"They started collecting this data with these digital meters in October 2010, so that's our starting point," Mayes said. "Going forward, we'll be able to keep the data in our data warehouse for years. So two years from now, you'll be able to go back and see what your energy consumption was in fiscal year '11 and fiscal year '12. And in fiscal year '20, you'll be able to go back and see for the last five or 10 years what your energy consumption has been."