Although there is considerable value to be found in analysis of interval data, there does not appear to be enough interval data experts to go around. Some organizations have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for interval data enterprise software, only to have it go unused, often due to lack of trained and available staff that can gain meaningful information from it.
Interval data can be used for several purposes, some of which are listed below:
- Determining when equipment is turned on and off
- Discovering and diagnosing equipment and controls problems
- Load shedding
- Aggregating energy usage across an enterprise into load profiles which can be used when procuring energy supply contracts,
- Applying rates to the interval data to get a better understanding of the hourly cost of running the facility.
Viewing utility bills in monthly (or billing) increments is a simpler discipline which is more comprehensible to management, more familiar to energy professionals, and more commonly practiced.
Plenty of useful information about a facility can be gleaned from utility bills, some of which are listed below:
Determining whether the facility is saving energy and utility costs- Identifying the most wasteful facilities
- Identifying controls and equipment problems
- Budgeting and Forecasting
- Understanding where utility costs are going
- Performing rate analysis
- Verifying that the utilities are billing correctly
- Identifying changes in facility usage patterns
As the primary focus of this website is Utility Bill Tracking, we will not cover interval data analysis here; however, it is important to note that some desktop packages can handle both your utility bill and interval data, and can reconcile your utility bills with interval data.