Abstract
Several technological, social and organizational factors influence energy management in school buildings, resulting in a complex situation away from the usual engineering approach. The selection of evaluation criteria to assess the energy performance of school buildings remains one of the most challenging aspects since these should accommodate the perspectives of the potential key stakeholders. This paper presents a comprehensive problem structuring approach combining Soft Systems Methodology and Value Focused Thinking to elicit and organize the multiple aspects that influence energy efficiency of school buildings. The main aim of this work is structuring the fundamental objectives to develop a criteria tree to be considered in a multi-criteria classification model to be used by management entities for rating overall energy performance of school buildings. This methodological framework helped grasping the main issues at stake for a thorough energy performance assessment of school buildings and the need to define adequate policies for improvement.
Highlights
A substantial amount of schools’ annual budget for operational costs is devoted to energy bills
The present study focused on performing a demand-side analysis of the buildings energy consumption
The interrelated values about the same fundamental concerns were grouped into categories, which are associated with fundamental aspects for assessing the energy efficiency of schools
Summary
A substantial amount of schools’ annual budget for operational costs is devoted to energy bills. A major rehabilitation programme—Secondary School Building Modernisation Programme—has been carried out in Portugal since 2007 [4] This programme was launched as part of a public investment stimulus strategy throughout the country. The analysis of the impact of this programme, namely regarding the operational costs of renovated schools, was the main motivation for the research work presented in this paper, which was carried out in the framework of the R&D project Energy Efficient Schools (E3) [5]. This project focuses on energy consumption and indoor environmental quality
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