Time-Based Energy Conservation Measures in an Academic Building

This paper proposes a time-based no-cost category of energy conservation measures (ECMs) enabled by audit-driven building energy modeling. The study presents an audit-to-simulation framework applied to an academic building (Electrical Engineering Department, Assiut University, Egypt) following the audit levels and requirements of ASHRAE Standard 100-2024. The building operation is characterized via audit findings, high-resolution electrical monitoring, and occupancy profiling, then translated into a calibrated building energy model (BEM) developed using SketchUp, OpenStudio, and EnergyPlus. The validated BEM serves as a decision-support testbed to evaluate the proposed ECMs prior to implementation, enabling quantification of their impacts on annual and daily energy use, peak reduction, and load-profile shape. The proposed ECMs are classified into two subcategories: working-day ECMs and time-slot-modification ECMs. The first category involves adjusting the number of working days per week. The second category includes several scheduling-based strategies, namely seasonal time shifts, modification of lecture and tutorial session durations, rearrangement of lectures and tutorial sessions, and shifting peak-demand time slots. The simulation results show that modifying lecture and tutorial durations (ECM3) is the most effective measure, achieving 6.2% annual energy savings, followed by seasonal time shifts (ECM2) with 5.8%. For peak demand, reducing operation during peak periods (ECM5) lowers the daily peak load by 25.9%. The combined implementation of the proposed ECMs reduces annual energy consumption by up to 16% and daily peak demand by 29.4%. The findings highlight the substantial potential of structured audit-informed operational strategies in university buildings, emphasizing their role as low-risk, high-impact interventions for peak management and energy performance enhancement.