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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Erates: A computer program for calculating time-of-use, block, and demand charges for electricity usage (version 1. 0). User's guide and reference manual

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:5887564
ERATES (Electricity Rates) is a computer program for calculating monthly and annual electricity costs for a facility, building, or system under a variety of electric utility rate schedules. Both kWh usage and maximum kW demand charges can be included in these costs. Most typically these calculations will be used to support engineering-economic studies which assess the cost-effectiveness of energy conservation measures or measures to shift electricity use from on-peak to off-peak time periods. With ERATES a user can set up time-of-use-rate schedules, block-rate schedules, and demand-rate schedules and save these schedules to a disk file. The user can then compute monthly and annual electricity costs with ERATES, given hourly or monthly kWh and kW demand data for a facility, building, or system. ERATES is a menu-driven, interactive program, designed to be run on an IBM-PC or compatible microcomputer under DOS version 3.0 or higher, with or without a hard disk. ERATES block-rate and demand-rate schedules can be imported by the NIST BLCC 4.0 computer program for use in computing the life-cycle cost of buildings and building systems. ERATES is not intended for use by utilities in setting up or administering electric rate schedules.
Research Organization:
National Inst. of Standards and Technology (CAML), Gaithersburg, MD (United States). Office of Applied Economics
OSTI ID:
5887564
Report Number(s):
PB-93-228658/XAB; NISTIR--5186
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English