Commercial Buildings: Education Buildings
Education buildings are the fifth most prevalent commercial building type in the U.S., with approximately 309,000 buildings. This category includes preschools, elementary schools, middle or junior high schools, high schools, vocational schools, and college or university classrooms. They are, on average, the largest commercial buildings, with 2,332 m2 (25,100 square feet) per building, and they account for 13% of all commercial floor space.
They consume a total of 0.19 Gigawatt hours (614 trillion BTU) of energy per year, with the following distribution of energy sources:
- Electricity: 36%
- Natural Gas: 40%
- District Heat: 15%
- Fuel Oil: 9%
The average end use of these energy sources in U.S. education buildings can be classified as follows:
For a primary school building:
Meanwhile, a typical University building has the following consumption profile:
Education buildings are on average less energy intensive than office buildings, and the latter less than hospitals. The relative energy intensities for these three building types are 1, 1.5-2, and 3-4, respectively.
Educational buildings present a favorable electric to total thermal ratio of 0.67 for integration of a DGCCHP system. Even when considering the heat recovery system to produce domestic hot water only, the E/T ratio (1.94) is still compatible with some DG-CCHP technologies. Again, the implementation of absorption cooling can improve the overall heat recovery utilization by making electric and thermal loads more coincident and by increasing the thermal demands. The CCHP technical potential for schools only is about 15 GW and reaches 18 GW if colleges and universities are included, with more than 10 GW of real market potential. The CCHP technical potential for educational buildings in California is 2 GW.