Evaluating and Improving the Energy Performance of School Buildings with a Proposed Real-Time Monitoring System

Building energy consumption occupies a significant portion of the final energy consumption, and its trend is increasing. Due to a substantial contribution to the energy use of commercial sector by office buildings, much attention has been brought to them with energy-efficient measures. However, there are only a limited number of studies investigating the school building’s energy consumption performance, especially in Canadian cold climate, which it allows opportunities for improving school building’s energy efficiency. In this study, the historical electricity consumption and energy-related costs of Edmonton Catholic Schools are statistically analyzed. Energy benchmarking methods are applied to evaluate the energy performance of schools and categorize them. With the aim of improving the energy performance of school buildings by discovering energy saving opportunities existed in them, an electrical management program is proposed with the real-time monitoring system. The proposed framework for lowering the electricity consumption of schools can be continually used by school facility operators in the future to identify inefficient school buildings and electricity abusers inside them.