Energy benchmarking for secondary school buildings, applying the Top-Down approach

Abstract

Public buildings such as schools have a great potential for energy efficiency as well as improving their performance to reduce CO2 emissions. Schools with huge building areas, a large number of users, and various equipment use more energy compared with other building types. Top-Down energy benchmarking is a policy tool that detects inefficient buildings in a community, so it has a fundamental role in energy efficiency management on a large scale. This study aims to evaluate end-use energy benchmarks for secondary schools based on a Top-Down statistical method. In this regard, the real monthly energy consumption from 2016 to 2019 in 31 school buildings were analyzed. The standards of 9, 171, and 180 kWh/m2/yr were determined as electricity, thermal, and total energy benchmarks respectively. In addition, based on the Spearman test correlation analysis, 14 parameters that may affect the energy consumption were analyzed; among them, the building useful area and volume had the highest impact on electricity consumption; however, population density and building volume had the highest impact on the thermal consumption. The developed benchmarking methodology presents a band of benchmarks instead of a single-value mostly found in the literature.