Abstract
There is a wide variation in the energy consumption between different educational institutions due to the adoption of different management strategies and different levels of occupants’ environmental understanding. The presence of large amounts of information and communication technology (ICT) equipment and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system causes a major consumption of energy in higher education institution (HEI) buildings. The main objective of this research is to investigate the use of ICT to optimize the energy consumption in HEI buildings and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emission. The first phase of the system has been implemented at King Saud University to measure energy consumption through sensors that read energy consumption of electrical appliances and devices every 10 seconds. The analysis of collected data allows us to develop and employ energy saving strategies that lead to a reduction in total energy consumption. Our preliminary results show that up to 17% of energy consumption can be reduced by simply dealing with standby energy loss of labs’ computers. The novelty of this research comes from the use of a functional database approach to deal with high volume of data and query performance and the incorporation of a timetabling system in energy management system.
Highlights
Today’s world is facing an unprecedented challenge in controlling increasing greenhouse gases emission, which is the main cause of global warming
In developing the energy devices/appliances ontology for higher education institution (HEI) domain, we focused on encoding attributes related to the energy efficiency of the devices/appliances to provide a tool for rich knowledge representation for reasoning tools
The system is in operation, and we are collecting the energy consumption data for ten laboratories and ten offices at the moment; more laboratories and appliances will be monitored in the phase of the project
Summary
Today’s world is facing an unprecedented challenge in controlling increasing greenhouse gases emission, which is the main cause of global warming. The burning of fossil fuel in order to generate energy for domestic, public, commercial, and industrial use is a major source of CO2 emission. Most of the currently available energy management systems are concerned with real-time energy consumption monitoring and the displaying of energy consumption statistical and real-time data [2,3,4,5] These systems play a crucial role in providing a detailed picture of energy consumption to occupants and building managers of residential, commercial, and educational buildings. The majority of these systems does not automatically adjust energy usage and leave it to the occupants to respond appropriately to reduce their energy consumption [2,3,4,5]. These systems have serious limitations in their integration with HVAC
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