Business Intelligence Tool

Business Intelligence Tool

Tuesday, 31st of January of 2019

In the past decade, the energy efficiency has grown substantially due to its benefits in addressing many of people’s most pressing concerns: system reliability and regulations and rising costs. In this sense, we created an intelligent energy consumption tool based on the historical data collected by Verbund sensors and stored in Grafana platform for data analysis and monitoring.

The platform relies on creating and evaluating economic performance perspectives of energy efficiency for various user-defined scenarios.

The data are used to determine specific KPIs related to energy efficiencies inside a building, such as Internal Rate of Return (IRR), Net Present Value (NPV) and Return Of Investment (ROI).

Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is a metric used in capital budgeting to estimate the profitability of potential investments. The Internal Rate of Return is a discount rate that makes the Net Present Value (NPV) of all cash flows from a particular project equal to zero. IRR calculations rely on the same formula as NPV does. The following is the formula for calculating NPV:

Where:

Ct = net cash inflow during the period t
C0= total initial investment costs
r = discount rate
t = number of time periods

Return on Investment (ROI) is a performance measure, used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. ROI measures the amount of return on investment, relative to the investment’s cost. To calculate ROI, the benefit (or return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment. The result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio. The return on investment formula:

ROI = (Gain from Investment – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment

In order to use the Business Intelligence Tool, the first step is to create a scenario. For this, the user has to click on the green plus sign in the bottom right corner of the screen.

A new window will open. Here the user adds data regarding the offer received from the Energy Service Company, like the value of the investment and the duration of the return of the investment.

By clicking the Plus sign in the top right corner of the scenario, a set of rules can be added.

By clicking on the scenario, the baseline bill which represents the consumption history average and the current bill, which represents the EnergyPLus simulation, can be added for each month of the contract. After these values are added, the results and KPIs are automatically calculated.

Entries can be edited by clicking on the Edit button. KPIs can be visualized in various forms, such as diagrams and graphs.



Author: Teodora Usurelu

Company: Beia