Looking for building energy and performance data? UBC Energy & Water Services makes all of its data freely available online, via the SkySpark platform.
Students, researchers, and UBC energy managers use this data to track energy saving projects, compare the energy performance of different types of buildings, and evaluate best practices in new building construction. All this data collection and exploration is part of UBC’s Campus as a Living Lab initiative.
SkySpark consists of a suite of applications to provide data analysis or access to the data. The guest account can access four apps:
- Buildings App gives snapshots of building performance, and allows for download of utility data
- Energy App allows for comparison of energy use between buildings, as well as baselining and weather or area normalization
- Historian App allows viewing of one or more trends, as well as simple regression modeling
- Weather App shows present, forecasted, and historic weather data
Log In to SkySpark
Access SkySpark (CWL required)
Access SkySpark by logging in here using your CWL login. If you do not have a CWL account, you may be eligible for a sponsored account. Please contact your project manager or the Energy and Water Services executive secretary.
Skyspark is an Internet of Things (IoT) platform from Skyfoundry that uses heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) and energy data to improve building performance.
In 2017, Energy & Water Services’ Energy Conservation team started tracking energy and water data using Skyspark and now use the platform daily to optimize building control and identify energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) savings opportunities. Skyspark has enabled long-term storage from 68,000 data streams including:
- 370 energy meters for 152 campus buildings.
- 5,000 pieces of HVAC equipment
- 3 Building Management Systems (BMS) system vendors
How does SkySpark work?
Data Integration: UBC Building’s HVAC systems are controlled using a three vendor Building Management System (BMS) that uses feedback from sensors to maintain thermal comfort and ventilate spaces. All the sensor data is temporarily stored on BMS panels scattered across campus. Skyspark collects data every 15 minutes from the energy metering system (Scheinder) and the three different BMS systems vendors (Johnson, Delta, Siemens) we have on campus.
Figure 1: Skyspark System Integration
The Haystack Metadata Standard: In order to makes sense of all of this data, an open-source initiative that defines a comprehensive list of tags called Project Haystack is used to understand HVAC data. By using Project Haystack, we developed our own tagging tools using regular expressions to parse BMS point names. Once the tagging tool is in SkySpark, all data records get automatically tagged following the Project Haystack standard.
Apps within SkySpark
The Buildings app allows the user to access information about the performance of UBC’s building stock. This includes key performance metrics and building utility data about a specific building, or measurements of the building stock as a whole. Each tab allows for access to slightly different information.
The Building Summary tab gives snapshots of building data, including basic information such as construction year or gross area. Selecting a building will bring up a performance summary for the building. The display consists of the following elements:
- Building and time span selectors.
- Basic information about the building; construction year and gross area given in square meters.
- Breakdown of the building’s space use, as specified by UBC Campus & Community Planning, and the UBC-wide average total EUI for each use type.
- Energy and Water Use Intensities for the selected building and time span are given on the left, and are compared against a theoretical average building with the same floor space breakdown.
- Confidence factors give an indicator of data quality for the selected time span. A data point is expected for every 15 minutes of the selected span, but some may be unavailable due to meter errors or communication failures. Some dropped data (a confidence value less than 100%) is to be expected.
- The Energy Use Intensity given for the current fiscal year (linearly forecasted) as well as up to the previous five fiscal years if available.
- Electrical and thermal load duration curves constructed for the selected time span, as well as the two previous time periods of the same length.
The Building Utilities tab allows for viewing of a single building’s utility data all on one page. As with the Building Summary tab, a building and time span can be chosen using the selectors. Additionally, individual utilities (electrical, thermal, and water) can be explicitly included or excluded from display. By default, an automatic data rollup will be chosen. This means that daily data will be shown for a one-year display; hourly data for a month’s display, and so on. This rollup can be overridden and another interval selected, but note that SkySpark can only display a maximum of 10,000 data points at a time. Recall that data can be downloaded using the export button near the top right.
On the Campus-Wide EUIs tab, it is possible to see how EUIs at UBC have been trending over a long period of time. Each individual day’s EUI (or WUI) value is calculated based on the previous 365 days’ energy and water consumption.
The Campus EUI Summary Table and Ancillary Buildings EUIs tabs display buildings’ EUIs for the selected time span. Additional information for any column, including exact values, can be found by clicking on the column in question.
Finally, the Building List tab simply lists the buildings which have some amount of data integrated into SkySpark.
The Energy app gives detailed information on energy use by one or more buildings. Energy can be examined over time in the Usage tab, compared against equipment trends in the Operation tab, or patterned in the Profile tab. By default, the app will include data for all buildings, so it is highly recommended, upon first opening the app, to select “sites” near the top right corner, and double clicking the particular buildings of interest. When chosen, buildings should show up on the right hand side, under the Selected column.
In the Usage tab, after selecting the building(s) of interest, the utility measurement to be examined can be changed by clicking the “options” button near the right-hand side. The Point selection allows the user to choose between electrical, thermal, or water data as available. Note that the “Water (kW) and Water (MWh) measurements are for district hot water. Likewise, the unit of measurement can be selected, changing between orders of magnitude, or metric and imperial units. This dialog box also allows for other view modifications, such as normalizing by floor area or weather (balance point of 18°C); ranking buildings if multiple are selected (by max, if viewing a power unit, or by sum if viewing an energy or volume unit); or including a baseline period for comparison.
The Historian App allows viewing of one or more trends, as well as simple regression modeling.
The Weather App shows present, forecasted, and historic weather data.
Troubleshooting
- If only the “Home” app appears at the centre of the screen, click “UBC” on the left-hand side.
- Each individual app may consist of several different views, which can be selected by clicking the appropriate tab along the top of the page.
- At any time, a view within SkySpark can be exported using a button near the top right corner. The pdf or image file generated can be either downloaded or emailed. If the view is comprised of a single dataset, csv and excel files are also available as possible export files.
If SkySpark appears to not have any content after logging in, don’t panic. This is expected behaviour, and happens when a specific project has not been selected.
To alleviate the issue, click the “Projects” dropdown list, and select the “Lobby” project.
When this is done, all apps accessible to your user account should be visible.
To request help with logging in, accessing data, or for any other support, please contact the Energy & Water Services Executive Secretary at energyandwater.executivesecretary@ubc.ca.