Development of Baseline Monthly Utility Models for Fort Hood, Texas

Abstract

The Fort Hood Army base in central Texas has more than 5,200 buildings and can be considered as typical of large Department of Defense Army bases in the continental United States. The annual utility bill of the base exceeds $25 million. Baseline monthly models for electricity use, electricity demand, gas use, and water use for the three cantonment areas of Fort Hood have been developed. Such models can be used as screening tools for detecting changes in future utility bills and also to track/evaluate the extent to which Presidential Executive Order 12902, mandating 30% decrease in energy utility bills from 1985 to 2005, is being met. In this analysis, 1990 has been selected as the baseline year to illustrate the predictive capability of the models. Since ascertaining the uncertainty of our predictions is very important for meaningful evaluations, we have also presented the relevant equations for computing the 95% prediction intervals of the regression models and illustrated their use with measured data over the period of 1989-1993. This study also evaluated two different types of energy modeling software- the Princeton Scorekeeping method (PRISM) and EModel- in order to ascertain which is more appropriate for baseline modeling of large Army installations such as Fort Hood. It was found that the EModel software, which has more flexibility to handle different types of linear single variate change point models, gave more accurate modeling results.