BTAP allows you to quickly generate archetype buildings based on Canadian codes, and apply common energy
conservation measures to explore design package performance. BTAP calculates energy, NECB Tier performance,
operational carbon and relative capital costs for all scenarios where possible.
Some unique features of BTAP:
- NECB Rulesets allow quick generation of NECB models for all locations and NaturalGas, Electricity and HP baseline systems.
- Dynamic Costing that automatically accounts for load/sizing change costs for heating and cooling equipment. Using RSMeans 2020 data.
- Operational GHG accounting using rate from Portolio Manager 2020
- Utility Costs using Canada Energy Board 2021 rates.
The most common used cases for BTAP is to:
- quickly generate NECB archetypes for 2011 through 2020 for any building type and location.
- examine the cost/performance of the National Energy Code for buildings in all location in Canada.
- examine cost-effective design pathways to high performance buildings.
BTAP data can also be used to generate beautiful dashboards. For example this
dashboard was developed doing a series of BTAP Batch analyses.
BTAP will automatically cost most relevant materials, equipment and labour. BTAP Costing will only cost items that have energy impact. It will, for example, cost the wall construction layers, but not the structural components. Some items that BTAP costs are:
- Labour, Overhead
- Layer Materials in Constructions and fenestration.
- Piping, Ductworks, Headers based on actual geometry of the building. This is required when evaluating forced air vs hydronic solutions.
- Standard HVAC Equipment, Boilers, Chillers, HeatPumps, Service Hot Water.
Some examples of items it will not cost are:
- Internal walls, doors, toilets, structural beams, furniture, etc.
BTAP Batch has a command line interface. You can use the (help) -h switch to reveal all the commands. Here is an example of the help output.
(venv) PS C:\btap_batch> python ./bin/btap_batch.py -h
Usage: btap_batch.py [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...
Options:
--version Show the version and exit.
-h, --help Show this message and exit.
Commands:
aws-download Download results from 1 or more analyses performed on...
aws-kill This will terminate all aws analyses.
aws-rm-build This delete all resources on aws for the given...
batch This will run all the analysis projects in a given folder...
build This will build the environment required to run an analysis.
credits People that worked on this
run This will run an analysis project.
run-examples This will run all the analysis projects in the examples...These commands will be made more clear in the workflow examples below.
Software requirements for running btap_batch can be found here
Instructions for downloading btap_batch from github and installing supporting Python packages are here
Instructions for configuring your btap_batch and creating a build environment can be found here
BTAP has a array of pre-developed building geometries for building types. These models already have full geometries and space types assigned to spaces. So you can use these immediately for analysis. However, you can also create your own building type geometry and space type assignments. More information on geometries is here
- Optimization: Run a genetic optimization for a fixed number of runs and generations based.
- Parametric: Run all possible combinations in input file.
- Elimination: Examine theoretical maximum energy savings from each domain for a given model.
- Sensitivity: Examine the energy and cost effect from each measure selected. (~100 measures)
- Latin-Hypercube-Sampling: Sample the solution space with a given number of simulations
- Batch: When you wish to simply run a few specific building scenarios for comparison.