Energy Audit in Educational Buildings : Case study of Fridhemsskolan in Gävle

Abstract: The global share from buildings towards energy usage in residential and commercial buildings have been increasing constantly reaching between 20% to 40% in developed countries and has overtook the other major sectors: industrial and transportation. Energy demand reduction in the building sector is important for Sweden to achieve national energy aims for reduced energy use in the future.  For this reason, energy efficiency measures in buildings today is one of the main objective for energy policy towards 2020 goals.   This project moves on the same path to find energy efficiency potential in Fridhemsskolan buildings in Gävle, Sweden by performing energy audit using IDA-ICE software to simulate energy performance for the buildings under study. In addition, measurements have been made on three of the school buildings named Hus 1, Hus 2 and Hus 3.   The results include different energy efficiency retrofits on each building and economic analysis of these retrofits for each building individually and for the whole buildings together. The presented measures are reducing working hours of the ventilation system in Hus 2, change of CAV system with VAV system in (Hus 1 and Hus 2) and lights changing to LED, s efficient lights and building envelope improvement which includes walls and roof extra insulation and windows replacement.   Replacement of the CAV system in Hus 1 and Hus 2 were not economically beneficial when considering their high cost compared to energy reduction that can be achieved by applying them. On the other hand, energy retrofits analysis showed that combination of the following energy efficiency measures is the most effective and profitable: extra insulation (walls and roof), windows replacement and lights change to LED in the three buildings. In addition to these measure is reducing running hours of the ventilation system in Hus 2.   Implementation of the recommended energy efficiency measures will save 120, 737 kWh/ year of the district heating and 21, 962 kWh/year electricity consumption with capital investment of 417, 396 SEK and 98, 957 SEK/ year cost saving with payback period of 4.2 years. These figures represent 40.3% and 18.1% reduction in district heating and electricity energy use respectively.   Since reducing working hours of ventilation system measure has no capital investment and have the highest figure of energy reduction it reduces payback period significantly. In case the amount of money saved by this measure doesn’t consider; payback period for the other measures which require capital investment will be 13.5 years and the energy saving in terms of cost will be 30, 874 SEK/ year.