Reposting to fix calculation description (see bold text)..

Hi Deceryl,

Thanks for asking this. I realize this feature is not sufficiently documented. Here's some further info, which I will integrate into LEAP's help files when I get a chance.

When you choose Import from Annual Shape in the General: Yearly Shapes screen you will be asked to reference a range in an open Excel spreadsheet containing 8760 hourly values (365 days * 24hrs). Those values must be in chronological order and each value is assumed to represent the energy consumed in the hour (e.g. a kWh). The actual units don't really matter though as everything gets normalized to percentage values.

One you've selected the hours, LEAP scans through all of them and allocates each value to a time slice. How each hour corresponds to a time slice depends on what kind of time slicing you have chosen as time slicing is quite flexible and can include data describing, seasons, months, weeks, types of days (weekdays, weekends, etc.) and different numbers of grouping within a day (24 hours, 4 hourly periods, night/day, etc.).

One important point to note is that LEAP and NEMO do not model specific hours in specific years. Rather they model representative years. Time slices are assumed to repeat every year. and each year is assumed to start on a Monday. Ironically given its name, LEAP also does not understand the concept of leap years (which have 8784 hours, and of course there are also leap minutes and leap seconds.). We chose to do things this way so that you can compare peak loads across seasons, times of day, and years, but this implies that you should not use LEAP to try and create detailed peak forecasts for some particular day & time in the future.

Bear in mind also that you can further tweak time-slicing by adjusting the definition of seasons, hourly periods and weekdays/weekends). You can do that via the Settings button in the General: Time Slices screen.

It also calculates the total and the maximum values for the year (across all time slices) and the total and maximum energy within each time slice.

Next, LEAP calculates the time slice values.

Internally LEAP can also convert shapes from this one format to the other.

If a yearly shape is created this way, then behind the scenes LEAP also stores the raw hourly values for all 8760 hours defining the shape. It does this so that if you later choose a different time slicing arrangement, it can then regenerate the yearly shapes automatically, which can be quite handy if you want to play around with different time slicing arrangements. That regeneration process just redoes the calculation described above.

I hope this helps.

Charlie

P.S. In your separate email, you also mentioned a technique called PAM. I'm not familiar with that. Can you describe what it is?