Strategies for reducing energy consumption in existing office buildings

Abstract

This work establishes viable low-cost building system energy conservation measures (ECMs) while maintaining thermal comfort and good indoor air quality for existing office buildings in Mediterranean climate, taking an eight-storey office prototype building for analysis. The low-cost ECMs explored include raising indoor temperature cooling set point, lighting control, air economizer, night purging, and utilization of condensate drain to cool the direct expansion unit condenser to improve the overall system coefficient of performance. A standard system audit methodology and advanced energy modelling techniques were used to replicate the building base case. It is found that the building electrical energy consumption can be reduced by more than 16% energy without compromising thermal comfort when implementing the low-cost ECMs with minimal disruption and installation cost on existing building systems.