Baselines for Energy Use and Carbon Emission Intensities in Hellenic Nonresidential Buildings

Abstract

This work exploits data from 30,000 energy performance certificates of whole nonresidential (NR) buildings in Greece. The available information is analyzed for 30 different NR building uses (e.g., hotels, schools, sports facilities, hospitals, retails, offices) and four main services (space heating, space cooling, domestic hot water and lighting). Data are screened in order to exclude outliers and checked for consistency with the Hellenic NR building stock. The average energy use and CO2 emission intensities for all building uses are calculated, as well as the respective energy ratings in order to gain a better understanding of the NR sector. Finally, in an attempt to determine whether these values are representative for the various Hellenic NR building uses, their temporal evolution is investigated. The average primary energy use intensity is 448.0 kWh/m2 for all NR buildings, while the CO2 emissions reach 147.5 kgCO2/m2. The derived energy baselines reveal that indoor sports halls/swimming pools have the highest energy use, while private cram schools/conservatories have the lowest, due to their operational patterns. Generally, from the four services taken into account, lighting is the most energy consuming, followed by cooling, heating and finally domestic hot water. For a total of 11 building uses, more data from the certificates will be necessary for deriving representative baselines, but, when it comes to buildings categories, more data are required.