What's New

FEDS 6.0—Coming Soon

FEDS 6.0 marks yet another substantial step forward in the continued evolution of the FEDS software. Picking up where FEDS 5.0 left off, FEDS 6.0 has added enhancements to make it more powerful and flexible than ever, and just as easy to use. A detailed central energy plant and thermal loop module was added, enabling vastly improved modeling of central steam, hot water, and chilled water— from the equipment that generates it to the distribution loops that deliver it to the buildings where it provides heating, cooling, hot water, or other services, calculating the energy content and losses at each step. A number of other new and improved features have also been added to FEDS 6.0, including new technologies, updated data, and more detailed means of specifying a building's occupancy profile and geometry. A more complete listing of what's new in FEDS 6.0 follows:

Completely Updated Central Energy Plants and Thermal Loops Module: Completely Updated Central Energy Plants and Thermal Loops Module:

FEDS 6.0 will now enable much more detailed specification and analysis of any number of central energy plants and their associated loops and can determine:

• The total load from all connected buildings and other central plant equipment, both at baseline and throughout the retrofit optimization process
• The value of steam, hot water, or chilled water delivered to each building, considering central plant equipment types and efficiencies, source fuel costs, auxiliary power requirements, O&M costs, loop losses, and other parameters
• The cost effectiveness of various decentralization options including:
  • Which individual technologies served centrally should be replaced with distributed technologies,
  • Which building sets should be decentralized,
  • Which thermal loops of a central energy plant should be abandoned with all attached buildings becoming decentralized, and
  • Which central energy plants should be abandoned with all attached loops becoming abandoned and all attached buildings becoming decentralized
• This central plant and thermal loop analysis occurs automatically in conjunction with optimization of building energy systems.

Advanced Building Geometry Capability:

An advanced geometry option allows users the ability to specify detailed specification of building geometry parameters at the specific zone and/or orientation level. This enables more detailed and accurate modeling of unique and difficult to model buildings, such as those with non-uniform geometries (that may impact a zone's wall or roof area, or volume) or envelope characteristics (e.g., different window areas on each side of the building). Parameters that are available by zone for advanced specification include the following:<./p>

• Exterior wall area
• Exterior window area
• Roof area
• Floor area (both total and ground floor)
• Exterior perimeter building length
• Conditioned air volume

Replace on Failure Economics (i.e., "Force Retrofits")

From its inception, FEDS has always provided retrofit recommendations based on detailed life-cycle cost analysis. However, it has always been assumed that the current building technology or component was in working order and did not have to be replaced. Now with FEDS 6.0 users have the ability to specify that a particular piece of equipment or component must be replaced, and therefore require that FEDS select the best, most life-cycle cost effective replacement. Whether it be that the furnace has stopped working or that the windows must be replaced, FEDS can now perform the necessary analysis to inform you on what the best replacement would be. With a simple check of box on the proper FEDS input screen, you can instruct the model to determine the best replacement, as well as the estimated cost of the project. This provides the option to force specific building technology or envelope retrofits, or the abandonment of specific thermal loops or entire central plants.

Enhanced Occupancy Profile Definition:

FEDS 6.0 provides greatly enhanced specification of building occupancy profiles:

• 4-day workweeks: specify whether your facility operates on a 5-day (Mon-Fri) or 4-day (Mon-Thur) schedule. This can be specified at the individual building set level to mix and match schedules within your case to best fit actual occupancy patterns.
• Variable occupancy specification: expanding upon the previous monthly occupancy inputs (which allowed you to specify whether a building was operating or not during each given month), this new feature will allow much greater flexibility by being able to not only model building operation for fractions of each month, but also whether the non-operating portion represents fully unoccupied periods or low-occupancy periods.

New Technologies:

Numerous new technology options have been added to FEDS 6.0, including the following:

• Radiant and infrared heating: a variety of radiant and infrared configurations are available to suit a range of cost effective heating applications
• Allowing chiller type specification (water- versus air-cooled, along with reciprocating, centrifugal, and absorption options)
• Added water-cooled chillers plus cooling tower retrofit options for existing air-cooled chillers and building chiller systems as replacements for window air conditioners
• New baseline and retrofit lighting technology options including super T-8s

Data Updates and Other Enhancements:

New and updated data include:

• New weather data—415 additional weather data files (originating from various formats including TMY2, WYEC2, TRY, and some specially developed for FEDS) including 63 new weather cities. For cities with multiple data types available, you will be able to select which you would like to run, if desired.
• The latest DOE/EIA discount and energy escalation rates

Other key enhancements include the following:

• Import building sets—an import tool to allow building sets from other existing cases to be added into the current case, to allow the combining of data for integration of multi-user input sessions or simply to combine data from separate case files.
• Enhanced output reports— additional features on the output reports include energy intensity values for all building sets and the entire facility by fuel type, and central plant and thermal loop details.

FEDS 6.0 will be available soon. Please check back to order your copy online.

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