District Cooling in ASHRAE Energy Cost Budget Method

edit

There are not a lot of details in the Energy Cost Budget Method section of 90.1-2016, but two of the footnotes to Table 11.5.2-1 Budget System Descriptions provide some information:

and

and they both reference 11.4.3, which discusses steam and chilled water here:

For System 6, since it uses direct expansion cooling, as shown in 11.5.2-1, I think there is no other way to interpret the baseline except that it uses a normal direct expansion water source heat pump, as described in footnote g.

Based on this, you model an entire water source heat pump system as the baseline as if it were not a district system at all. Since it is a heat pump, you would use an electric rate for the baseline for the fluid cooler, and presuming there is no boiler in your proposed design, you would use fossil fuel for that.

This is just my opinion on interpreting this for your situation, and it is not official at all. If you want to get an official or unofficial interpretation from ASHRAE, see

https://www.ashrae.org/technical-reso...

But it is not the fastest process.