More load profiles for manufacturing industries

Hi Mike,

The data available from the Download Electric Load data macro in SAM is from the " Commercial and Residential Hourly Load Profiles for all TMY3 Locations in the United States " dataset on the OpenEI website. It was created in 2014 and generated by a building energy model for a few building types for 1,000 locations around the United States. The weather files used to generate this data came from the old NSRDB "TMY3" dataset with data from 1991-2005. This data is convenient to use because you can download it directly into SAM, and it does provide some information about the load shape you might expect for a limited set of building types in a range of climate zones, but it is only a rough approximation of the actual load you would expect for a specific building.

Newer data is available from NREL's End-Use Load Pofiles for the U.S. Building Stock , but is designed for regional models that require load data for a group of buildings, for example, all of the buildings in a county. It does provide access to data for individual buildings, but this data is less well-suited to use with SAM because 1) it is difficult to access without tools for and knowledge of large datasets, and 2) the individual load profiles have unrealistic spikes because they are designed to be aggregated with many other load profiles to create an aggregate profile rather than to represent a single building.

We created a set of Python scripts to download the End-Use Profile data to use with SAM that you can explore, but it requires knowledge of Python, and it takes time to learn how the scripts work, and to understand the structure of the data on OpenEI.

I am not aware of other sources of load data, but if anyone else, does, please let us know by posting a reply.

Best regards,
Paul.