Building Activity and Consumption Profiles in University Campuses

Opening hours are frequently reused as occupancy schedules in building-energy assessment, although access availability and occupation describe different temporal conditions. This paper quantifies this difference and relates both to metered electricity consumption in the teaching stock of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC). Published access schedules for 2025 were compiled for its eighteen teaching centers, and hourly electricity from ten verified smart meters was classified into three mutually exclusive states: (a) teaching hours, (b) open hours outside teaching hours, and (c) closed hours. At the university level, teaching hours were approximated by each center’s general teaching-hours window. Across the eighteen centers, buildings were open for about 30% to 52% of the year’s hours and closed for the remaining hours (48.3–70.5%). The share of recorded electrical consumption, however, varies in each of the categories: (a) teaching hours carried 28.5–40.4% of the recorded annual consumption in 18.2–21.7% of the time, (b) open hours outside teaching carried 19.0–36.4% in 12.5–31.7% of the year, and (c) closed hours (although being the longest state) carried 23.2–51.9%. The Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) was used as a detailed case study where teaching hours were also resolved room-by-room. At least one classroom was timetabled during 21.5% of the year’s hours, the mean classroom was timetabled for 7.1% of the year (about a seventh of the building’s accessible time) and the open hours without timetabled teaching covered 26.7% of the calendar hours and 31.0% of the recorded consumption. Across the full week, whole-building consumption followed the general daily teaching-hours window (r = 0.92) more closely than the classroom timetable fraction (r = 0.77). Pooled across the ten classified meters on recorded hours, taking an “open hour without teaching” as the reference intensity (1.00), closed hours ran at 0.57 and teaching hours at 1.20.