Feasibility Study on Energy Audit and Data Driven Analysis Procedure for Building Energy Efficiency: Bench-Marking in Korean Hospital Buildings

摘要

Growths in population, increasing demand for health care services and comfort levels, together with patients on the rise in time spent inside hospitals, assure the upward trend that energy demand will continue in the future. Since the hospital buildings operate 24 hours, 365 days a year for the treatment and restoration of patients, they are approximately 2−3 times more energy-intensive than normal buildings. For this reason, energy efficiency in hospitals is one of the prime objectives for energy policy at regional, national and international levels. This study aims to find how meaningful energy performance, reflecting good energy management and energy conservation measures (ECMs), can be operated for hospital buildings, a category encompassing complex buildings with different systems and large gaps between them. Energy audit allows us to obtain knowledge from the healthcare facility, in order to define and tune data driven analysis rules. The use of benchmarking in the energy audit of healthcare facilities enables immediate comparison between hospitals. Data driven energy analysis also allows ascertaining their expected energy consumption and estimating the possible savings margin by using the building energy flow chart. In the 2015−2017 periods, bench-marking of four public hospitals in Seoul were audited for the energy consumption related to weather conditions, total area, bed numbers, employee numbers, and analyzed for building energy flow by zones, energy sources, systems and equipment. This is a practice-based learning in a hospital project. The results reveal that the average annual energy consumption of a hospital under normal conditions, and energy efficiency factors are divided into energy baselines, energy consumption goals for energy saving and energy usage trends for setting ECMs, respectively. The indicator dependent on the area of inpatients (number of beds) proved to be the most suitable as a reference to quantify the energy consumption of a hospital.