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This paper introduces a methodology to conduct an energy assessment at a Higher Education Institution (HEI) based on the international standard ISO 50001. This methodology was applied at the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente (UAO) in Cali, Colombia, to develop energy consumption baselines for each building and the air conditioning system of the main building based on the establishment of relevant variables affecting the energy consumption of each Significant Energy Uses (SEUs). The energy assessment allows us to determine energy performance improvement opportunities. This study case identified that energy consumption could be reduced by 14,2% by applying actions on the campus lighting, office equipment, and air conditioning system. This study provides guidance and guidelines for conducting an energy assessment at a university campus, with restrictions on measuring energy consumption. It provides insights for other universities implementing an Energy Management System and the government for conducting public energy policies.

The effort to reuse historical structures has been a constant endeavor from the past to the present. With the increase in the number of universities in Turkey since the 1990s, some of the universities in need of structure have converted historical buildings to higher education functions. In this study, in which the physical conditions of historical buildings functionalised as higher education buildings are evaluated, the historical building known as Frej Apartment used by Istanbul Galata University will be discussed as a case study. With the change of the building over time, the conditions of higher education buildings according to physical criteria were analysed. From this point of view, 'Physical environment control parameters are effective in determining spatial quality in historical places functionalised as educational buildings' is the hypothesis of the research. The findings show that the preservation of historical and spatial values as well as having functions to meet contemporary needs are the issues to be considered. As a result, considering the central location of the re-functionalised historical buildings and the cultural asset brought to the city, a sensitive approach has been exhibited both in terms of the educational infrastructure of our country and architectural style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electricity is used in educational buildings, and there are now numerous attempts to reduce consumption, achieve sustainability, and protect the environment. This paper aims to study energy consumption, identify opportunities to rationalize energy consumption, and propose solutions at Sulaiman Al-Rajhi University in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in order for the university campus to become sustainable. The results showed that total annual electrical consumption totaled 13,859 MWh in 2021. The air conditioning system, other devices, and lighting have the percentage of consumption 79, 14, and 7% of the total, respectively. Electricity consumption intensity was approximately 145–155 kWh/m2, and the per capita intensity was approximately 12,987–16,351 kWh, in the period 2017–2021. The price of the electrical energy generated on the university campus ranged between 0.3 and 0.53 SR/kWh in 2021, while the electricity tariff from the grid for educational buildings was 0.18 SR/kWh. This means that the public grid was 50% cheaper than campus-generated electricity. At the price of energy generated by generators, the total simple payback time (SPBT) for the suggested energy conservation measures (ECMs) is 4.13 years, whereas the SPBT is 8.96 in the case of the consumption of the electricity supplied by the national grid. The environmental benefits of the proposed ECMs were also identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic forced higher education institutions to switch to online learning for most of 2020 and 2021 for the safety of their students and staff, which significantly impacted campus resource consumption. This study aims to analyze the changes in electricity consumption in higher education buildings based on comparisons of three academic years to understand more about the energy implications of the post-COVID-19 era. The electricity data were collected from 181 samples of the electricity meter records at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. When compared to the typical academic year in 2018, the results indicate that electricity consumption in 2019 and 2020 decreased by 20.92% and 35.50%, respectively. The academic and the library-type buildings marked the biggest change in electricity reduction. The smallest change was found in the research type as its essential work remained on campus. Only electricity consumption in the residence type increased due to the long periods of online learning policies. Finally, the findings suggest that teaching and learning activities have a strong influence on electricity consumption in higher education buildings. The facilities and learning methods related to these activities should be carefully discussed as elements of an effective strategy to manage electricity demands at the university level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electricity is used in educational buildings, and there are now numerous attempts to reduce consumption, achieve sustainability, and protect the environment. This paper aims to study energy consumption, identify opportunities to rationalize energy consumption, and propose solutions at Sulaiman Al-Rajhi University in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in order for the university campus to become sustainable. The results showed that total annual electrical consumption totaled 13,859 MWh in 2021. The air conditioning system, other devices, and lighting have the percentage of consumption 79, 14, and 7% of the total, respectively. Electricity consumption intensity was approximately 145–155 kWh/m2, and the per capita intensity was approximately 12,987–16,351 kWh, in the period 2017–2021. The price of the electrical energy generated on the university campus ranged between 0.3 and 0.53 SR/kWh in 2021, while the electricity tariff from the grid for educational buildings was 0.18 SR/kWh. This means that the public grid was 50% cheaper than campus-generated electricity. At the price of energy generated by generators, the total simple payback time (SPBT) for the suggested energy conservation measures (ECMs) is 4.13 years, whereas the SPBT is 8.96 in the case of the consumption of the electricity supplied by the national grid. The environmental benefits of the proposed ECMs were also identified.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced higher education institutions to switch to online learning for most of 2020 and 2021 for the safety of their students and staff, which significantly impacted campus resource consumption. This study aims to analyze the changes in electricity consumption in higher education buildings based on comparisons of three academic years to understand more about the energy implications of the post-COVID-19 era. The electricity data were collected from 181 samples of the electricity meter records at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. When compared to the typical academic year in 2018, the results indicate that electricity consumption in 2019 and 2020 decreased by 20.92% and 35.50%, respectively. The academic and the library-type buildings marked the biggest change in electricity reduction. The smallest change was found in the research type as its essential work remained on campus. Only electricity consumption in the residence type increased due to the long periods of online learning policies. Finally, the findings suggest that teaching and learning activities have a strong influence on electricity consumption in higher education buildings. The facilities and learning methods related to these activities should be carefully discussed as elements of an effective strategy to manage electricity demands at the university level.

In this paper, the energy performance of a university campus in a tropical climate is assessed, and four mixed classroom buildings are compared using benchmarking methods based on simple normalization: the classic Energy Use Intensity (EUI), end-used based EUI, and people-based EUI. To estimate the energy consumption of the case studies, building energy simulations were carried out in EnergyPlus using custom inputs. The analysis found that buildings with more classroom spaces presented higher energy consumption for cooling and lighting than others. In comparison, buildings with a greater percentage of laboratories and offices exhibited higher energy consumption for plug loads. Nevertheless, differences were identified when using the people-based EUI since buildings with larger floor areas showed the highest values, highlighting the impact of occupant behavior on energy consumption. Given the fact that little is known about a benchmark range for university campuses and academic buildings in hot and humid climates, this paper also provides a comparison against the EUIs reported in the literature for both cases. In this sense, the identified range for campuses was 49–367 kWh/m2/year, while for academic buildings, the range was 47–628 kWh/m2/year. Overall, the findings of this study could contribute to identifying better-targeted energy efficiency strategies for the studied buildings in the future by assessing their performance under different indicators and drawing a benchmark to compare similar buildings in hot and humid climates.

Highlights • Investigating accessibility in existing buildings according to national codes. • The buildings’ new expansions are blocking exits and original PWDs’ paths. • Activating architect's role in determining buildings' future expansions. Abstract The study aims to investigate the accessibility in existing educational buildings in accordance with Jordanian National Building Codes – Building Requirements Code for the Disabled (BRCD) to promote the ‘right to work’ and ‘the right to get the higher education’ for Persons with Disabilities (PWD). The study has targeted School of Engineering (SE) buildings at the University of Jordan (UJ). The methodology consists of contacting officials in charge; interviewing SE students and UJ staff members, having certain disabilities; evaluating SE buildings according to BRCD renovation requirements for educational buildings; studying SE plans to compare the designed paths with the existing ones and to clarify the accessible areas of buildings’ floors. The study has concluded that many BRCDs were not implemented in SE buildings, and many areas were inaccessible. Moreover, findings also demonstrated that new expansions were blocking the original PWDs’ paths, and many obstacles that PWD faced, were not taken into consideration in BRCD. Thus, the study recommends referring to the newest international approaches to focus on the less considerable aspects in BRCD, as well as activating architects’ role in determining building’s future expansions and modifications and fending off new barriers to PWDs’ paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study introduces a post-occupancy evaluation to assess the performance of one of the buildings at MSA University (a pioneer private university) in Cairo, Egypt, from the users’ perspective. The main objective of this study is to understand the relationship between the built environment demonstrated in the Faculty of Engineering indoor spaces and the needs of the college community comprising the students and staff. This will underpin the strengths and shortcomings of the present design to facilitate future improvements. The adopted methodology utilizes a number of assessment techniques, including observation, walk-through, questionnaires and interviews. The study culminates with a number of recommended actions to improve the building’s performance from the users’ (students and staff) perspective, which have a strong impact on the learning experience. These are classified into immediate, intermediate-term and long-term actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate space-use prediction helps architects to optimize space efficiency in buildings, thereby achieving economic and environmental sustainability. However, current space-use prediction models and approaches either disregard or oversimplify the role of building users’ space preferences in spatial-choice behaviour, thereby compromising prediction accuracy. The aim of this study was thus to develop a space-preference model of spatial-choice behaviour with a focus on group work-related activities. A total of 2464 observations of spatial choices were collected using a discrete-choice experiment. The data were modelled using a conditional logit model and then validated in a predictive success test. The resulting model clearly explains space preferences for group work-related activities and predicts spatial-choice behaviour by generating space-use probabilities for given spaces. The model is compared to a space-preference model for individual work-related activities. Lastly, the application of the model was demonstrated in a case example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to assess sustainability of buildings, environmental, economic and social aspects should be addressed. Within the evaluation of the social criteria, regarding a building in the use stage, the standard EN 15643–3:2012 defines, as a general methodology, a list of performance categories to be addressed. General guidelines for the evaluation of these performance categories are provided by standard EN 16309:2014, and its effective assessment is mainly based on qualitative criteria and a checklist approach, which does not enable an easy comparability of the results of different assessments. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to perform a social life cycle assessment of school buildings for higher education, focusing on the criterion of health and comfort, which addresses different sub-criteria. In the proposed methodology different levels of assessment were defined. In the first level are each one of the sub-criteria for health and comfort (e.g. thermal characteristics), being this evaluation based on a bottom-to-up approach. For some of the sub-criteria, there are recommendations, stablished in standards or technical codes, which were followed to define this methodology at baseline level. The Analytical hierarchic process (AHP) was used to overcome the lack of reference values for the assessment of the remaining sub-criteria. Within each assessment level, a multi-criteria approach was required to reach a score. The list of weights to be used requires an expert sensibility. A comprehensive survey based on an AHP method was used as reference at the top-level evaluation, to obtain the weighting scheme to rate social performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a variation focused cluster analysis strategy to identify typical daily heating energy usage profiles of higher education buildings. Different from the existing cluster analysis studies which were primarily developed using Euclidean distance as the dissimilarity measure and tended to group the daily load profiles with similar magnitudes, Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) clustering algorithm with Pearson Correlation Coefficient-based dissimilarity measure was used in this study to group the daily load profiles on the basis of the variation similarity. A comparison of the proposed strategy with a k-means cluster analysis with Euclidean distance as the dissimilarity measure was also performed. The performance of the proposed strategy was tested and evaluated using the three-year hourly heating energy usage data collected from 19 higher education buildings in Norway. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in identifying the typical daily energy usage profiles. The identified typical heating load profiles provided the information such as the peaks and troughs of the daily heating demand, daily high heating demand period and daily load variation. The identified profiles also helped to categorize multiple buildings into different groups in terms of the similar energy usage behaviors to support further energy efficiency initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results of work developed in the field of building energy benchmarking applied to the building stock of the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Portugal, based on a thorough energy performance characterisation of each of its buildings. To address the benchmarking of the case study buildings, an energy efficiency ranking system was applied. Following an energy audit of each building, they were grouped in different typologies according to the main end-use activities developed: Pedagogic buildings, canteens, residential buildings and office buildings. Then, an energy usage indicator was used to establish a metric to rank the buildings of each typology according to their energy efficiency. The energy savings potential was also estimated, based on the reference building energy usage indicator for each typology, and considering two different scenarios, yielding potential savings between 10% and 34% in final energy consumption.

In this paper, the energy performance of a university campus in a tropical climate is assessed, and four mixed classroom buildings are compared using benchmarking methods based on simple normalization: the classic Energy Use Intensity (EUI), end-used based EUI, and people-based EUI. To estimate the energy consumption of the case studies, building energy simulations were carried out in EnergyPlus using custom inputs. The analysis found that buildings with more classroom spaces presented higher energy consumption for cooling and lighting than others. In comparison, buildings with a greater percentage of laboratories and offices exhibited higher energy consumption for plug loads. Nevertheless, differences were identified when using the people-based EUI since buildings with larger floor areas showed the highest values, highlighting the impact of occupant behavior on energy consumption. Given the fact that little is known about a benchmark range for university campuses and academic buildings in hot and humid climates, this paper also provides a comparison against the EUIs reported in the literature for both cases. In this sense, the identified range for campuses was 49–367 kWh/m 2 /year, while for academic buildings, the range was 47–628 kWh/m 2 /year. Overall, the findings of this study could contribute to identifying better-targeted energy efficiency strategies for the studied buildings in the future by assessing their performance under different indicators and drawing a benchmark to compare similar buildings in hot and humid climates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research is to propose an internal comparison approach to inform energy efficiency of higher education buildings. Traditionally, the median values of Energy Use Intensity (EUI, unit: GJ/m2) from the Energy Star program can be used as a benchmark to assess buildings of the same category and primary function. However, higher educations buildings tend to have mixed usages (e.g., lab, classroom and office). Thus, instead of labelling a building with a single primary function, this work examines the percentages of floor areas of different usages for each building (e.g., 25% classroom and 30% office). Then, the data of floor-area percentages are analyzed using linear regression and hierarchical clustering. Based on our case of 24 campus buildings, we have classified four types of floor areas: lab, public services, school services and other. The regression model can correlate the EUI with these floor-area types with R 2 = 89.62%. Based on both regression and clustering results, we employ the analyses of residuals and building groups to investigate the energy efficiency of our building stock. This study has shown that the proposed method can provide some insights for facility management to investigate and prioritize the energy issues of the building stock. Unique insights include the energy efficiency of lab-intensive buildings and the identification of inefficient buildings which are less obvious in the original EUI comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applications of renewable electricity in cities are mostly limited to photovoltaics, and they need other renewable sources, batteries, and the grid to guarantee reliability. This paper proposes a hybrid system, combining biomass and photovoltaics, to supply electricity to educational buildings. This system is reliable and provides at least 50% of electricity based on renewable sources. Buildings with small (<500 kW) installed power based on renewables, mainly biomass, are usually expensive. Besides, in urban areas, photovoltaic capacity is limited due to roof availability. This paper analyzes different configurations, meeting these constraints to obtain an economically feasible solution based on photovoltaic-biomass modelling of small size hybrid systems. The technology used for biomass energy valorization is a fluidized bed gasification power plant, which has been modelled with real data obtained from experimental tests and previous research projects. Thereby, real costs and electric efficiency are included in the model. The techno-economic feasibility analysis using HOMER software with metered real load curves from an educational building has been modelled. The results of the model show that hybrid renewable systems are very feasible in the scenario of 50% of electricity contribution, however, higher contribution (>70%) implies high electricity costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintaining the thermal comfort of occupants along with minimising the related energy consumption is necessary in educational buildings in the UK. Thermal comfort is particularly important in this context as it affects how well students learn in the classroom. This study aims to identify comfort temperature ranges in different classroom types, lecture rooms, studios and PC labs in UK higher learning environments. Overall, more than 3,000 university students in Coventry and Edinburgh were observed and surveyed simultaneously with the monitoring of environmental measurements under free-running, cooling and heating modes, in October and November 2017 and January to March 2018. Thermal comfort zones and comfort temperatures were identified in each classroom type under these three operation modes. The thermal comfort zone was shown to be significantly dependant on the operative temperature in the studios and PC labs. In terms of the students' priorities for adaptive behaviour inside the classrooms, students in the lecture rooms and PC labs with lower levels of freedom, preferred to restore their thermal comfort through personal adaptive behaviour. However, environmental behaviour was shown to be preferred in the studios where the occupants have a greater freedom level. Results indicate a higher level of physiological and psychological thermal adaptation for the occupants of the studios and PC labs compared to those in the lecture rooms. Consequently, the type of classroom and the students' freedom levels should be considered in environmental design of higher education buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]