Exemplary Energy is pleased to announce that our weather and climate datasets are now available through our new sales portal.

We are currently offering data across 11 key sites (8 capital cities, plus Alice Springs, Mildura and Thredbo), providing coverage of all NCC climate zones in the Australian Climate Data Bank (ACDB) and Energy Plus Weather (EPW) formats. An extension to 250 sites across Australia will be available in the coming weeks with the full 69 NatHERS Climate Zones being given priority, including versions complete with precipitation data.

Our data incorporates meteorological observations up to the end of 2022, and avoids the well understood but serious flaws present in the data which the CSIRO continues to publish.

We are pleased to note three major improvements in this latest release:

• Inclusion of observations to the end of 2022;
• Incorporation of precipitation, derived from half-hourly observations when available and from the results of our advanced machine learning tool “Anaconda” in other cases; and
• Vastly improved estimates of cloud cover compared to previous versions.

We are also offering a range of data types including Real-Time Years (RTY), Reference Meteorological Years (RMY) with 33-year and 15-year basis periods¹, Industry Standard Meteorological Years (ISMY, produced as a corrected version of CSIRO’s 1990-2016 RMY data), eXtreme Meteorological Years for PV (XMY_PV) and Ersatz Future Meteorological Years (EFMY).

1. stay tuned for further information on this and our other advancements in future blog articles ↩︎

The first eight people to purchase any weather or climate data set through our new web portal will be our guest[1] at the AIRAH Awards 2023 on 30 November 2023 at the Sofitel Sydney in Darling Harbour.

The AIRAH Awards recognise excellence and achievement in Australia’s HVAC&R building services industry and this annual celebration has been running in its current form since 2009. Extra individual tickets are available for $250 each.

This annual gala dinner is the opportunity to celebrate the industry’s high achievers, stand-out projects, and ground-breaking research.

We’re proud that Exemplary Energy is the sponsor of this year’s AIRAH Award for Excellence in Sustainability[2].

Click here to get more detailed information about the event.

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[1] Fares not included.

[2] Exemplary regrets to note that the long-running award for “Innovative Use of Renewable Energy in HVAC&R” has been rolled into the award for “Excellence in Sustainability” and hopes that this will be restored as a separate category in future years.

A number of datasets can characterise the ‘typical’ climate for a location: Reference Meteorological Years (RMY) are intended to provide an indication of 50th percentile weather-sensitive performance for small (RMY-B with a 33% weighting for solar) or deep plan (RMY-C with a 17% weighting for solar) non-residential buildings, or for solar sensitive infrastructure (RMY-A with a 50% weighting for solar) such as housing and PV generation; while eXtreme Meteorological Years (XMY) reflect to Nth percentile of performance for solar PV, HVAC¹ and moisture¹.

However, our concept of ‘typical’ climate is changing. The years spanning from 2015 to 2022 have marked the eight warmest years on record, and it is expected that this trend of increased warming will persist due to rising anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and consequential ice-cap retreats. These developments have significant implications for the relevance and quality of climate data employed for building and energy system simulations.

Within the context of a warming climate, the reference period for these data become a critical consideration. Fundamentally, the conventional reference period—1990-2015, as used by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) for their problematic data—no longer accurately represents the current climate at a given location.

For example, the climate in Canberra has changed to be warmer, more humid and windier but with reduced solar irradiation.

One serious consequence of this is that the climate data commonly used by modellers for demonstrating construction code compliance, sizing HVAC systems and optimising building and energy system designs is likely not an adequate representation of the climate that the building will experience during its operating life. 

A shorter reference period accounts for recent climatic change, but comes at the risk of tracking short-term “blips” rather than providing an indication of long-term climate normals. Advice from the Bureau of Meteorology² suggests that a balance between the stable reference baseline and provision of an implicit predictor of the most likely near-future conditions may be found with a reference period of 10-15 years.

Clear Trends: Simulation Results for Sydney over 33 Years

We evaluated the results of applying 33 years of Sydney’s weather data to simulations of the three archetype buildings used in our Exemplary Weather and Energy Index (EWEI), finding that annual cooling, heating and total energy demand (see figure, L-R respectively) show a clear trend of rising cooling and decreasing heating. This result held for each building archetype and when averaged across all three building types.

The net result is about a 2 per cent per decade increase in total energy demand. This is despite the results of cooling seen since 2018 (an 8.8 per cent reduction in cooling energy was seen over the period 2018-2022) and should be a serious concern to energy planners and facility managers in light of the warmer years that the climate models tell us are coming our way.

We have proposed shorter, more recent reference periods to better characterise evolving climate dynamics. One of our papers to this year’s Asia-Pacific Solar Research Conference will present the results of implementing RMY datasets with a 15-year reference period spanning 2008-2022 (taking account of BoM advice²), and comparing this to a 33-year reference period from 1990-2022 as well as the outdated CSIRO reference period of 1990-2015. Further, we intend to revise this work in future years to better understand the sensitivities between energy and climate as it unfolds.

For the sake of standardisation we suggest that users seeking to demonstrate compliance with the National Construction Code continue to use our Industry Standard Meteorological Year (ISMY) data, which is a corrected version of the data based on the 1990-2015 reference period that is published by CSIRO, without the gross errors contained in CSIRO’s data (see here, here and here for a summary of just some of the problems we have encountered).

However, modellers seeking to provide deeper insights will be interested to know that all of the RMY datasets described above are available now from our sales portal alongside a range of data products covering the eight Australian capital cities and all eight of the NCC climate zones.

1. NB Exemplary’s XMY’s for HVAC and precipitation are under development and not yet commercially available ↩︎
2. Trewin, B, 2007, ‘The Role of Climatological Normals in a Changing Climate’, World Meteorological Organisation. Available at: https://library.wmo.int/records/item/52499-the-role-of-climatological-normals-in-a-changing-climate. Accessed 5 September 2023. ↩︎

All Energy Australia is the country’s largest annual gathering of renewable energy and energy efficiency professionals. Held annually in late October in Melbourne, the 2023 event included exhibitions from over 375 suppliers and a conference with more than 300 speakers, attracting more than 11,500 industry professionals.

This year’s conference themes ranged from residential retrofits to hydrogen, smart homes to HVAC, and electric vehicles to large-scale renewable energy generation. While the Exemplary Energy team did not present, we tried to cover as much of the 12 parallel conference sessions an enormous exhibition space as we could with the short time and resources at our disposal.

Highlights related to our work include the Allan government’s official launch of the Victorian State Electricity Commission’s Strategic Plan 2023-35 setting priorities in finance and skills for the energy transition, demand response in low- and zero-emissions buildings, and discussions around the challenges and opportunities facing the heat pump hot water industry. We also found the opportunity to catch up with a swathe a our partners and associates, including having a good chat with our friends at Weatherzone Business about potential future collaboration and partnership.

Needless to say that such a large event provided a great opportunity for discussions with our associates and strategic partners on the central role that understanding the relationship between energy, weather and climate will play in moving the energy transition forward. On that front, we will continue to bring you news here on our blog. Those keen to engage further can always contact us at exemplary.energy@exemplary.com.au

Exemplary Energy is pleased to announce that we have joined the Australian Alliance for Energy Productivity (A2EP).

A2EP is billed as an independent, not-for-profit coalition of research, business and government leaders. With an emphasis on collaboration, they aim to further technologies and systems that don’t just use less energy but yield far more value from every unit of energy they do use.

We have long collaborated with A2EP members by providing weather and climate data for a range of applications in design and implementation of energy efficiency activities. Now, with a growing interest in applying our tools and resources to challenges in Monitoring and Verification (M&V), we see the opportunity to leverage A2EP’s network and skills to better understand the behind-the-meter interventions and business models that we expect to be working within and alongside.

We look forward to an active membership of the organisation and hope to contribute as much to the alliance as we expect to gain in benefits.