by Shane Henson — June 28, 2013—The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently announced the availability of Energy DataBus, a system that allows organizations to store and process their energy data.
NREL’s Energy DataBus is currently used for tracking and analyzing energy use on its own campus. The system is applicable to other facilities—including anything from a single building to a large military base or college campus—or for other energy data management needs, says NREL.
The NREL notes that managing and minimizing energy consumption on a large campus is usually a difficult task for facilities managers: There may be hundreds of energy meters spread across a campus, and the meter data are often recorded by hand. Even when data are captured electronically, there may be measurement issues or time periods that may not coincide. The Energy DataBus software was developed by NREL to address these issues on its own campus, but with an eye toward offering its software solutions to other facilities. Key features include the software’s ability to store large amounts of data collected at high frequencies—NREL collects some of its energy data every second—and rich functionality to integrate this wide variety of data into a single database.
“The data gathered by NREL comes in different formats, at different rates, from a wide variety of sensors, meters, and control networks,” says Keith Searight, development manager of the Energy DataBus. “The Energy DataBus software collects all this data and aligns it within one scalable database.”
NREL built the Energy DataBus on existing open-source software products that are used to manage complex data problems in other industries. The Energy DataBus supports the popular Cassandra database and PlayORM, which facilitates the easy integration of widely varying data. PlayORM provides the Energy DataBus with the capabilities it needs to interact with many types of data, including time-series, textual, or numerical data.
The Energy DataBus can operate at widely varying scales and can be integrated into small desktop applications and run on a laptop or virtual machine with only a few gigabytes of RAM. On the other hand, Energy DataBus was designed to support cloud architecture and can be scaled to hundreds or possibly thousands of nodes across the globe. For instance, NREL currently runs its production version of Energy DataBus with 12 database nodes on high-performance servers and four webserver nodes on virtual machines. However, for development, the team uses a version that runs in memory on a laptop.
NREL says that to employ the Energy DataBus, other facilities would need to connect their existing data collection systems with it and then configure it to meet their particular needs, and that it would be well worth the effort.
