ENERGY PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF ACADEMIC BUILDINGS WITH SPECIFIC REFERENCE TO THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

Abstract

As a key sector for socio-economic development, higher education institutions are growing in capacity to meet the demands for higher education. However, higher education institutions are also the largest energy consumers in the education sector. Thus, there is a pressing need to improve the energy performance of universities for ensuring sustainability. For effective building energy management, a good understanding of the building’s energy consumption behaviour is important to establish its energy performance. With a diverse set of academic buildings to meet diverse academic demands, it makes building energy management of a university a complex task. Furthermore, energy benchmarking of universities based on the EUI fails to capture differences in energy consumption behaviour across university buildings. This study aims to develop a greater understanding of the variation in energy consumption behaviour across academic buildings in a university, through detailed analysis of energy data for 8 case study buildings in the National University of Singapore (NUS). Findings of this study show that variation in energy consumption behaviour of buildings depend on not just the functional aspect of the building, but also the operational aspect which is dependent on occupancy rate and behaviour. Cluster groups are proposed based on findings of the energy consumption analysis, for better benchmarking and energy management of academic buildings in a university. Due to the wide scope of academic buildings, this study focuses only on academic buildings primarily used for academic activities and administrative offices.