One of the most common questions we get at Parity is what is weather adjustment, how does it impact your savings with Parity and how do we account for the weather when we calculate our savings?
The vast majority of multi-family buildings use gas for heating during the winter months. (The chart above is an example of gas usage from a building in a Northern latitude.) Gas use peaks from December to March, slowly dropping off as warmer weather approaches and the summer begins.
Electricity on the other hand is used for the most part to cool your building in the summer. Again, peak usage occurs as the weather outside gets warmer and your building’s chillers are called into action to keep your inside temperature at a comfortable level for residents.
In order to predict what your energy usage will be for the current year or before the season has begun, Parity looks at the previous year’s energy consumption of Gas and Electricity and identifies how many days heating was required, and how many days cooling was required to keep a steady and consistent indoor temperature.
We calculate the CDD (Cooling degree days) and HDD (Heating degree days) that were used to maintain a steady indoor temperature, in this case, of 20 °C. Using the chart above we can see that in 2019 this building required 135 days of heating (Gas = Winter) and 71 days of cooling (Electricity = Summer) to maintain that indoor temperature of 20 °C.
Because we have the data on your building’s previous year’s energy use, we create an accurate prediction and trend analysis on how many heating and cooling degree days your building will require for the current or upcoming year, again in this case to keep an inside building temperature of 20 °C.
At the same time the energy use trend that we’ve created based on your historical data, will also show you how much less energy your building will be using and how much you’ll be saving (backed up by our Savings Guarantee) under Parity control.
Think of this trend as what you would have used if Parity hadn’t been deployed in your building. This is what is called Weather adjusted Savings and is used by Parity to provide “data-backed” transparency on what your real savings are when Parity is deployed in your building, compared to the costs without Parity.
We strive to make our weather adjusted savings process transparent and understandable and we strictly adhere to an industry standard measurement and verification protocol called IPMVP (International Performance Measurement and Verification Protocol) It’s widely recognized globally as the gold standard when calculating weather adjustment.
If you have any questions or comments on your Weather Adjusted savings please reach out to your Parity sales executive or call us a 1-833-372-7489.
