Hospitals consume a large amount of energy mainly due to their continuous energy consumption needs, high energy consuming medical equipment and special requirements for thermal and air conditions. However, there is still a research gap in this large-scale building sector. A better understanding of these buildings helps to design more targeted energy saving strategies, more efficient economic investment for energy retrofitting of existing buildings and better management of the economic cost of energy in large-scale buildings.
The outstanding results are:
- To better understand this field, we present a comprehensive analysis of the most important current results on energy efficiency in buildings. A horizontal and selective assessment of their suitability according to a descriptive set of contexts and qualitative benchmarks is provided. See the article “Suitability analysis of modelling and assessment approaches in energy efficiency in buildings“(https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2017.12.002).
- Reliable dynamic simulation is a chimera due to the complex design and behaviour of these buildings. Therefore, monitoring-based methods emerge as a plausible alternative. Their main drawback, however, is the lack of sufficient data to generate statistically robust models. We address this problem thanks to the contribution of a hospital in Granada (Spain) that was able to generate daily electricity consumption data over a period of six years. In addition, thirteen variables summarising the hospital’s daily activity are included. The results show how machine learning techniques generate models that accurately predict electricity consumption with an average daily error of 3.8%. See the article “Energy Consumption Modeling by Machine Learning from Daily Activity Metering in a Hospital“(https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8247667).
- A consortium of partners from academia and industry is collaborating in this field to create a tool that will provide large institutions involved in energy efficiency programmes with information on the ideal energy consumption of the medical centre in different scenarios and on the most appropriate energy reduction plan for the medium to long term. All the knowledge gained by the consortium is being incorporated into a user-friendly software prototype that will make the theoretical results available to non-highly qualified personnel. More information at http://steer.ctadventure.com/.
Period
December 2014 – Present
Researchers
Jorge Casillas, Elena Ruiz
Partners: R. Pacheco-Torres, C. Koulamas, A.P. Kalogeras, L. Ferrarini,
