Development of Energy Management System GUI for Office

Building
1
Fadrick b Uno, 1,2N Y Dahlan
1
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Mara Shah Alam (UiTM), Shah Alam, Selangor
2
Power System Operation and Planning (PoSPO), Advanced Computing and Communication Communities of Research,
Universiti Teknologi Mara Shah Alam (UiTM), Shah Alam, Selangor

Keywords: Building energy index (BEI), visual basic, energy
audit.
Abstract
This paper presents a development of Graphical User
Interface (GUI) of Energy Management System tool for office
building using Microsoft Visual Basic Programming
software. The tool graphically displays the electrical and
thermal consumption of a building as well as the hourly load
profile. The tool also calculates the Building Energy Index
(BEI) and CO2 emission based on the consumption and
building data entered by the user. This energy management
system tool could help facility owner to manage energy
consumption and CO2 emission in a building every year.
Using the annual and hourly energy trending plotted by the
tool, the facility owner could identify the time when the
energy is mostly used hence develop strategy to reduce
energy. The tool could also be used by Energy Service
Company (ESCO) to analyze energy consumption data of a
building in preparing energy saving and audit report.
1 Introduction
Realizing the fossil fuel depleting and increasing of global
warming effect, energy consumption has become a matter of
concern for power providers and many other organizations
[1]. By taking a step to overcome this scenario, energy
companies have developed various strategies to manage the
energy efficiently. For example, using energy audit, energy
consumption can be control precisely and encourage the
community to save energy [2]. Thus, this effort can slowdown
the fossil fuel consuming process as well as bringing up the
opportunity for renewable energy in electricity industry.
It is reported that 40 percent of energy used in most of the
countries is from building. In the EU region for instance, 40-
45 percent of the total energy used is consumed by buildings
[3-5]. The increase of energy consumption from buildings has
becoming concern of many parties such as government, utility
company and building owner. Stern measures have been
taken in many countries through the introduction of building
regulations as a key element of energy efficiency. As a result
many Energy Conservation Measure (ECM) projects have
been conducted with the aim to reduce energy consumption in
the building.
In Malaysia, the Ministery of Energy, Green Technology and
water is responsible to promote energy efficiency. Various EE
programmes have been conducted such as Energy Efficiency
Building Showcase Models, Auditing and Retrofitting
Existings Building into Energy Efficient Buildings, Green
Building Certifications, Malaysia Industrial Energy
Efficiency Improvement Project (MIEEIP), Electrical
Equipment Labelling Program and Energy Efficiency
Awareness Campaign [6].
For Green Building Certifications, Building Energy Index
(BEI) is used as a rating point to indicate the building energy
performances. It is one of the Green Building Index tool.
Green Building Index is a rating system introduced by
Persatuan Arkitek Malaysia using other rating systems in the
world as references such as, Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design (LEED), Green Mark, Building
Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method
(BREEAM) and others [7]. As Malaysia taking it first step of
implementing energy management strategy to achieve low
carbon cities, Putrajaya where the center of government office
buildings are located has become the main framework of
energy efficiency [8]. Many organizations such as Malaysian
Green Technology Corporation (GreenTech), Sustainable
Energy Development Authority (SEDA), Green Technology
and Water Malaysia (KeTTHA) and other government
organizations have supporting this solution [8].
To assist facility owner and ESCO in managing energy
consumption in building, this paper proposes an Energy
Management System GUI using Microsoft Visual
programming software. This tool helps users to graphically
plot and compare electrical and thermal consumption every
year. Moreover, the tool can calculate BEI and CO 2 emission
based on the consumption and building data entered by the
user.
2 Energy Audit Process
In the process of developing the energy management system
GUI, a fundamental knowledge of energy auditing process is
required. One of the important parts in energy auditing is
energy accounting which involves collecting, organizing and
analyzing utility bill data [9]. The energy audit process
includes the following process as described below:
i. Preliminary consultation is to decide a suitable type of
audit for particular building. This is regarding the
building architecture and audit objective.

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 ii. Initial Data Gathering and Assessment - Site inspection
on the building including its system and operational
characteristic.
iii. On Site Inspection this process depending on the
previous inspection. It is a more detail inspection of
building component and system.
iv. Data Analysis and Evaluation all the data obtain will
be evaluated and developed recommendation.
v. Reporting to record data, recommendation, saving
estimation and cost of saving method implementation.
Instead of using a manual calculation while performing data
analysis and evaluation in the energy audit process, this paper Figure 2: The main page of the Energy Management System
proposes to improve the process by creating a GUI using tool using Visual Basic Software
Visual Basic to assist users to plot the energy consumption
trend and calculate BEI and CO2 emission in the building. 3.2 Building Description

3 Model Description
3.1 Overview of the Energy Management System
The inputs to the software have been divided into 4 sections
to make it more friendly used and organized as follows;
i. Building data- Include the location of building, building
image, area of the building and population size.
ii. Electrical Consumption Data- This type of data can be
required from utility bill of the building. It also can be
obtained from metering the load in building. The
electrical load includes office equipment and lighting.
iii. Thermal Load Consumption Data - All commercial
buildings in Putrajaya use chill water as a cooling agent.
This requires a large amount of energy that charged by
the chill water provider.
iv. Load Data- Load data consisting of daily load
consumption (24 hour) and weekly load consumption
(14 days).
The output from the tool is BEI, CO2 emission in kgCO2 and
display the graph of energy consumption in the building. The
hourly load profile shows one day and 14 days load activity.
These are shown in Figure 1.
At the front page, user can choose either to run the existing
file or to create a new project. User can click on button
Existing Project to load the existing project data and view
the results. For creating a new project, user needs to click on
New Project button. The front page of the GUI is shown in
Figure 2.
Figure 1: Program process
In this page, user can load building picture and enter the
building name. For location, this selection will determine the
carbon emission factor depending on the power provider in
the location selected. This information will be used to
calculate building energy index and carbon emission. User is
also required to enter general data of the building including
year of measurement, cold degree day, type of building
(commercial, industrial, residential, or etc.), area of the
building and population size. The net area of the building is
important to calculate the Building Energy Index (BEI). This
is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Building general data.
3.3 Energy Consumption Trending
In this section, the data is separated into two categories that is
1) maximum demand and 2) electricity consumption. User
needs to enter the monthly energy consumption and tariff to
calculate the cost for both maximum demand and
consumption as in Figure 4. The consumption trend will be
plotted based on the data provided. These graphs include
maximum demand power, maximum demand cost, electricity
consumption and electricity consumption cost.
For chiller consumption, user needs to enter chiller
refrigeration ton (RT) and refrigeration ton hour (RTH). The
tariff for chiller depends on the price set by the company that
provides the chilled water. For example, GDC is the supplier
for the chilled water at the government buildings in Putrajaya.
For 1 unit RTH the price is RM0.25 and the price for
maximum demand RT is RM114.3. Using the same concept

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as electricity, four graphs for thermal load will be plotted by
the GUI to view the trend of maximum demand, cost of
maximum demand, chilled water consumption and chilled
water consumption cost.
Figure 4: Electrical consumption data
Figure 5: Thermal consumption (chiller) data
3.4 Hourly Load Profile
One of the important parts of audit analysis is logging profile
for daily and weekly hourly load. In this part, user can load
the hourly load data for 1 day and 14 days. The data will be
displayed in the GUI as in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Logging profile data for 1 day and 14 days.
3.5 Building Energy Index and CO2 Emission
Building Energy Index (BEI) will be calculated after user
clicks the finish button at the end of the page as in Figure 7.
The formula is as follows;
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Building Energy Index (BEI) (1)
Net floor area is obtained from the building general data and
energy consumption is the total of electricity consumption
and chilled water consumption in a year. Carbon emission is
calculated to determine the amount of CO2 emitted in the
building. The formula is as follows:
Carbon Emission = Emission factor x Total Energy
Consumption (2)
Emission factor depends on the location of the building
selected by the user for example Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah
or Sarawak. The value of greenhouse gas grid intensity for
different locations in Malaysia as given by Tenaga Nasional
Berhad (TNB) are: Peninsular Malaysia equal to 0.6747
kgCO2/kWh, Sarawak is 0.841 kgCO2/kWh and Sabah is
0.531 kgCO2/kWh.
4 Result and Discussion
The tool has been tested using a set of data gathered from an
energy audit work conducted at a government office building
in Putrajaya, Malaysia. The data includes annual electrical
and thermal consumption from year 2009 to 2011, 1 day and
14 days hourly load data taken on 3rd July 2011 and 2nd July to
17th July 2011 respectively. The building has a gross floor
area of 83,416m2 and net floor area of 74,585m2.
The building description in the GUI is shown in Figure 7.
These include the year of the data, type of building, no of
floor, gross per area, net area, cold degree day and building
population. User can also upload the picture of the building as
shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Building description
4.1 Energy Consumption Trending
The consumption data is taken from utility bills and used as
the input for this tool. For maximum demand in 2011 the
tariff was RM25.9 per kW and electricity consumption was
RM0.312 per kWh. For chiller consumption, maximum
demand was RM114.3 per RT and chilled water consumption
was RM0.25 per RTh. The chilled water maximum demand is
constant because of the constant flow of water every day in a
month. The electricity and chilled water consumption in this
building in year 2011 is shown in Figure 8 and 9 respectively.

Figure 10: Graph of electricity energy trending in year 2011

Figure 8: Electricity consumption data in year 2011

The electrical energy trending is shown in Figure 11. The

maximum demand was higher during June to October period.
Energy saving strategy should be taken to reduce maximum
demand in these periods. On the other hand, electricity
consumption was higher in January, March and October. The
building management should focus in reducing the
consumption during these periods.

Figure 12 shows the chiller energy trend in the building.
Maximum demand has a constant trend. Chilled water
consumption was recorded higher in January, March, April
and May. The building management should determine a
suitable setting temperature in the building.
Figure 11: Graph of thermal energy trending in year 2011
Using the previous data entered by the user, the GUI will plot
another lines in series with the chart in year 2011 representing
the energy consumption in the previous years. With this
comparison, user can identify the performance or the effect of
any retrofitting activities that has been implemented in the
building. The electricity and chilled water trend for this
building was found decreased in 2011 compare to the
previous years. This was due to some ECM projects that have
been implemented in the building in 2011. These are shown
in Figure 15 for electricity consumption and Figure 16 for
thermal consumption.

Figure 9: Thermal consumption data in year 2011

The data in 2011 is also compared to previous years to

analyze the performance of the energy consumption in the
building by year. The building data from 2009 and 2010 such
as electricity consumption and chiller consumption are loaded
in the software and displayed in the GUI as in Figure 13 for
2009 and Figure 14 for 2010.
Figure 12: Electricity and thermal consumption for year 2009

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 a graph as in Figure 18 to study the hourly load profile in the
building.
From the one day hourly logging profile, it was found that the
operational hour of this building is from 7am to 7pm. The
load increase rapidly at 7am, after that became constant, then
decreased rapidly at 6pm. For 14 days logging profile of the
building, it shows that weekdays has higher load that
weekend. From this profile, we can recommend a saving
strategy to reduce the load. The load during 1 pm - 2pm can
be reduced because it is the lunch hours.

Figure 13: Electricity and thermal consumption for year 2010

Figure 16: One day and 14 days hourly load data

Figure 14: Electricity trending for different years

Figure 17: One day and 14 days hourly load pattern

4.3 Building Energy Index and CO2 Emission

From the energy consumption data in the building, the BEI of

the building is calculated as 188 in year 2011. This shows
improvement in BEI value of the building compare to normal
Figure 15: Thermal energy trending for different years building in Malaysia that has BEI in a range of 200 250.

4.2 Hourly Load Profile in 2011

= 188 kWh/year/m2
The hourly load data taken from 2nd july 2011 until 17th july
2011 for every 30 minute as shown in Figure 17 is plotted in However, the target is to achieve the Low Energy Office
(LEO) building index that requires BEI less than 100 and in

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long term could achieve Zero Energy Office (ZEO) building
that requires BEI less than 50. This can be achieved by
implementing a smart energy management system and
installing renewable energy source in the building such as
solar panel.
For annual consumption in 2011, electricity consumed 70%
of the total energy in the building and chiller consumed 30%.
However when considering the cost, chiller record a higher
cost that is 54% of the total cost of energy compare to
electricity with 46%. This is cause by the higher demand
tariff of chilled water. The carbon emission for the building is
calculated as 9,465,268 kgCO2 for 2011. This is shown in
Figure 18.
Figure 18: BEI and CO2 emission in year 2011
Compare to previous year, the BEI in 2009 was 194 and
increased to 200 in 2010. After some retrofitting programs
have been carried out in the building in 2011, the BEI reduced
to 188. This is shown in Figure 20. However, the BEI and
consumption of the building is still high compare to building
showcases like LEO and ZEO, therefore this building needs
more improvement in term of equipment and practice of
energy saving and efficiency. This is shown in Fig. 19 and
Table 1.
Figure 19: BEI and CO2 emission in year 2011 as compared
to previous years
2009 2010 2011
BEI 194 200 188
Table 1 Building Energy Index from 2009 to 2011
5 Conclusion
Energy management tool is proposed to calculate and analyze
important baseline energy parameters from the energy audit.
These help to improve and reduce time consumed from
conventional energy audit procedure. This tool could also be
useful for building management to perform analysis to
monitor the energy performance in the building. This user
friendly GUI is easy to use by any individual thus helps to
establish energy audit trend in Malaysia. In the future, this
software could be extended to also calculate energy saving
from ECM projects.
Acknowledgements
Our utmost gratitude goes to Universiti Teknologi MARA
(UiTM) who has sponsored this paper. We would also like to
acknowledge Public Works Department (JKR), Putrajaya
(Senggara Zon 1) who provide us with valuable data and
system information for the studies.
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