Portfolio Manager reviews and updates the following reference data once a year, usually in August (these changes are generally very small):
- Weather Station mapping - We check to see if any weather stations have large gaps in data and need to be removed from being an active weather station. If we do find weather stations to remove, then we remap the impacted zip codes. This only impacts a small number of US zip codes.
- Thermal conversion factors
- GHG emissions factors for plant-specific and regional electricity use whenever new eGRID data is available (which is about every other year) - See www.epa.gov/egrid
- All other emissions factors
- Default fuel cost data (as used in Target Finder and on the Design tab)
- Default fuel mix (as used in Target Finder and on the Design tab)
Some reference data is reviewed every 5-7 years (generally aligned with Score Updates), and any changes will be made during the annual summer update:
- Source Energy Conversion Factors
- National Medians
- Weather Station mapping - This is a larger review of weather stations/mappings that would bring in new weather stations and ones that were previously removed if they now have sufficient data. The results of this analysis will be to add significantly more weather stations to Portfolio Manager which will provide a closer/better weather station match for many buildings.
These factor updates are made retroactively to all of your data, except GHG emissions that are using the actual historical factors.
The exact factors can be found in the Technical Reference documents:
