Data Clearing House
About the project
This project tests the hypothesis that, in less than 6 months, data from 11 buildings at Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, along with electricity and gas utility data can be ingested to the Data Clearing House (DCH) platform and other databases so that a Renewable Energy and Enabling Technology and Services Evaluation Framework (REETSEF) report as specified in iHub LLHC1 can be produced for Metro North Health (MNH).
Outcomes will inform policy makers:
- What opportunities are available to optimise operations at hospital sites?
- Does industry have capability to onboard data to a central platform?
- Can service providers deliver Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Automated Fault Detection and Diagnosis (AFDD) from DCH datasets?
| Project title | DCH at scale: On-boarding Proof-of-Concept at a Qld hospital site |
| Project number | DHC9 |
| Project location | Brisbane |
| Lead partner | Buildings Evolved Pty Ltd |
| Project partners | Bar-tech Automation Pty Ltd and Metro North Health (MNH) – Qld Government |
| Project participants | CSIRO Energy Division (CSIRO) |
| Start date | 11/2021 |
| End date | 05/2022 |
| ARENA/i-Hub funding | $159,317 |
| Total project cost | $650,738 |
Need
MNH has a diverse set of buildings with large variability in age and systems contained within. Like many hospital buildings, they are in constant state of flux, and receive continual and ongoing upgrades.
While telemetry and sensors have the ability to generate large datasets, most of them are inaccessible due to on-premise data silos coupled with inconsistent naming conventions, while electricity and gas invoices arrive as PDF or paper documents. Modelling data becomes a per-building activity, making scalable application development an impossibility.
Without a standard metadata schema, application development cannot happen across the entire sector.
Action
The actions are twofold:
- Detailed machine data and tariff information will be sourced directly from the providers, including NEM12 electricity interval data from Energex. Building on prior work from i-Hub DCH6, Buildings Evolved will process utility datasets through their multivariate tariff engine for analysis and production of the REETSEF reports.
- Bar-tech will develop and deploy a Brick metadata schema to the DCH that will describe the ~100,000 data points. Historical data from OpenBMCS will then be backloaded into the DCH to help inform REETSEF, particularly HVAC load disaggregation – rather than relying on multivariate linear regression analysis
Outcome
The project will drive a rapid and substantial increase in deployment of smart algorithms to create demand flexibility that can be garnished from Government buildings and services, keeping in mind the principal objective of hospitals can appear to run counter to energy saving or demand flexibility.
However, optimisation should net improved occupant comfort first and foremost, with increased demand flexibility and energy savings a by-product. Opportunities will be found to improve operations such as staging of compressors, load shifting and other low-impact activities.
Additional impact
Additional impacts of the project are to:
- Demystify the process of integration of HVAC and building data to the i-Hub DCH
- Provide the tools and resources for industry
- Deliver hospital building data to the DCH using a standardised metadata schema for use by applications and services now and into the future
- Deploy the M&V app to begin baseline data sample.
This will assist in the commercialisation efforts of the DCH and induce demand by demonstrating the ease of on-boarding buildings to the DCH, and the benefits that flow from it.
Project Reports
| DCH9 DCH at Scale: On – boarding proof – of concept at a Queensland Hospital Site – Final project Report |
| DCH9 Lessons learnt report |
| DCH9 Sub – project knowledge sharing report |
Evaluation Framework
All sub-projects within i-Hub are evaluated as part of the ongoing i-Hub project management process. Evaluation is completed by the project manager and reviewed by the Activity Leaders Group and i-Hub Steering Committee. Please click here to read the Evaluation Framework.
Created 26/04/2022