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Measurement and Verification (M&V) and NMEC Services

CHOOSING THE RIGHT LEVEL OF M&V

Using measurements and trends, we verify your project saves energy and costs as expected. For utility programs, we ensure incentive dollars are spent only on projects that achieve savings.

Our experience enables us to choose the right level of M&V for your project or program and considers the project as a whole including energy saving measure type, project time frame, and anticipated measure savings.

M&V APPROACH

  • PROJECT SPECIFIC

    When determining the level of M&V, we always consider project details such as size and established savings history, as well as M&V protocols, IPMVP and FEMP. Experience shows us projects don't always neatly match protocol categories.

  • UTILIZE ALL DATA

    We always utilize all available energy data. This includes data from an building automation system and utility meter data.

  • EFFECTIVE SAMPLING

    Since M&V costs quickly increase with more data logging, we employ appropriate sampling techniques to ensure cost-effective M&V strategies.

We developed an open source r package, called nmecr, which is free to use for analyzing site-level, meter based, energy savings to help facilitate adoption of these methods.

M&V 2.0 / Normalized Metered Energy Consumption (NMEC)

With smart meters becoming common, more buildings have high-resolution consumption data. It’s very powerful for diagnostics, makes whole building M&V feasible and reliable in many cases.

We are pioneers in using whole-building, interval meter data to track and verify energy project savings, have authored numerous guidelines and implemented these approaches for many utility programs.

This approach to site-specific, meter based M&V has a few names: advanced measurement and verification (AMV), M&V 2.0, and in California goes by normalized metered energy consumption (NMEC).

Advantages over traditional regression-based M&V analysis include:

  • More data which provides more insight into building operations
  • Development of more accurate energy models that better match a buildings usage patterns on a daily, hourly, or sub-hourly basis
  • Potential for shorter monitoring durations, enabling projects to be completed faster
  • Lower cost due to data availability, automation, and standardization of methods
  • Rapid feedback on building energy performance

nmecr (NMEC R package)

We developed an open source r package, called nmecr, which is free to use for performing M&V when analyzing site-level, meter based, energy savings. Our goal is to facilitate adoption of these methods for encouraging deeper energy efficiency retrofit projects.

Additional Resources

As NMEC continues to become more popular and evolve, our engineers keep you up to date on the latest developments and insights on our blog. Recent posts include:

Need M&V / NMEC support for your project or program?

Practical Application of

IPMVP Protocols

We use the International Performance Measurement and Verification Protocol (IPMVP) as the basic reference for M&V methods. Frequently, we employ a modified approach to these guidelines which combines the guideline options and our practical experience conducting M&V.

ipmvp