The six record types
Measure organizes your data into six record types. They are the same six tabs you'll find in the bulk upload workbook.
Record | What it represents | Connects to |
Tags | Facilities, business units, regions and other groupings, plus their traits | Activities, metrics and renewables |
Activities | Individual sources of emissions | Tags, consumptions and emission factors |
Consumptions | How much each activity used over a date range | One activity |
Emission Factors | Custom conversion rates from usage to emissions | One activity |
Renewables | RECs, EACs, PPAs and other renewable instruments | Tags, traits or individual activities |
Metrics | Intensity denominators such as square footage | A tag or trait |
How the pieces relate
Activities are the center of the model. Every consumption and every custom emission factor belongs to exactly one activity.
Tags describe activities. An activity can carry many tags, such as a facility, a business unit, a fuel code or any other grouping you wish to apply to an activity.
Traits are inherited through an activity's tags. The traits that are related to a tag (for example the facility's country) pass down to every activity that carries that tag, so you only need to enter them once. In this way you don't need to tag every activity to a country, you can simply add it to the facility as a trait and each activity under that facility will be related to that country as well.
Metrics and renewables attach to tags and traits. Rather than pointing at a single activity, they point at a tag or trait. A square footage metric can attach to a facility tag. A renewable can attach to a country, a facility or any other grouping. Renewables may also be attached to individual activities or to multiple groups at once to allow for flexibility in distributing renewables.
Example
Consider a warehouse in Denver:
A tag
facility: denver-warehousewith traitscountry: US,us_egrid: RMPAandfacility_type: WarehouseAn activity "Denver Warehouse - Electricity" in category
s2.1, tagged withdenver-warehouseTwelve monthly consumptions of
electricity_purchasedin kWh on that activityA metric of 85,000 sq ft attached to
facility: denver-warehouse
Because the activity inherits country and us_egrid from the facility tag, Measure can find the right eGrid emission factor automatically. Because the facility has a square footage metric, you can report the warehouse's emissions per square foot.