Sustainable Energy Campus: A Challenge on Smart Facilities and Operations

Abstract

The annual electricity consumption on the Alameda Campus of Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, was around 14 GWh with a 1 MW base load, between 2006 and 2010. With the purpose of improving the overall energy efficiency within IST facilities, the “Sustainable Campus at Técnico” project was set in motion in 2012 as part of an energy management policy, which engaged different skills across the IST community. This paper describes the key activities carried out by staff, faculty, students and researchers, under the IST Energy Initiative. These encompassed energy and water usage audits, as well as the development of new auditing tools and thermal computational models of all campus buildings, the classification of activity indexes, occupancy levels and the installation of energy meters designed and manufactured by IST researchers. The implementation of no-cost energy conservation measures comprised awareness-raising and best practice adoption with the participation of operations and maintenance staff. Technical operations personnel have been given guidelines on energy-saving measures, and the remaining campus staff was encouraged to participate in energy and water-conservation activities. Measures to improve on-campus energy efficiency included the application of sun control window film in both glazed towers of the campus, as a consequence of the energy-saving estimates evidenced by computational simulations. The results achieved so far, which are explained in detail in this paper, show a significant decrease in electricity consumption, from 14 to 11.5 GWh, and a decrease from 1000 to 850 kW base load, which represents almost 20 % in energy savings, for the same level of service.