Energy consumption in schools - A review paper

Among all public buildings, on account of their educational purpose, school buildings have a major social responsibility. Therefore energy performance in this type of building is of great importance. The overall purpose of this research is to achieve a functional benchmarking, based on the real operation conditions of school buildings, by the exploitation of the results made public, through an intensive literature survey on energy consumptions in schools. The survey was made to gather data that is relative to energy consumption in school buildings, documented in the most diverse fields and units: global energy consumption values, electrical energy consumption; fuel consumption for heating, energy data consumption of schools expressed in annual cost per unit of heated/cooled surface area ($/m2) or per unit of heated/cooled volume ($/m3) or, finally, as the annual cost per student ($/student). The literature was analyzed to determine if a worldwide comparison among the published data could be established. The results suggest that when attempting to determine an energy benchmark some considerations should not be forgotten: standard indoor environmental conditions (IEC) for classrooms (set-point for indoor operative temperature of 20 °C in winter and 26 °C in summer as suggested in EN 15251:2007), electrical and heating consumption values should be kept separately, different education levels usually require different energy consumption values. A good way to normalize heating energy consumption is going through a climatic adjustment based on Heating Degree Days (HDD). For an impartial data comparison, based either on an operating rating or on a simulation carried out for reference conditions, benchmark reference values should be expressed in terms of billed energy data. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.