A detailed analysis of electricity consumption at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain)

Abstract

The current energy crisis has drastically altered forecast electricity plans and budgets for European university campuses. This situation heightens the need to analyze their electrical consumption, with two main goals: identifying their patterns and promoting the development of renewable installations for these consumers. Previous research has focused only on aggregated demand data, with the studies being based on estimations and forecasts, and focused mainly on single buildings. Moreover, there is a lack of scientific papers that provide a replicable codebase for electricity analysis. Our work presents a novel methodology to overcome these research gaps, proposing the first comprehensive, replicable and scalable codebase to analyze electricity consumption in universities. It is based on three steps. The first comprises automated data collection of real electricity measurements at each electricity supply point. The second develops the complete analysis of electricity consumption. The last step parameterizes this consumption by identifying seasonal and daily profiles. The research was applied to the University of Castilla-La Mancha, campus Albacete (Spain) case study. The results revealed the 4 highest electricity-demanding buildings: Biomedical Complex, Higher Technical School of Industrial and Computer Engineering, Vice-rectorate and Library, and Higher Technical School of Agricultural and Forestry Engineering. The results are thus of great value for other educational buildings.