Energy Performance of Selected Administrative Buildings in Tertiary Education Institutions in Niger State, Nigeria

Abstract

The adverse effect of huge energy consumption of buildings on the global climate had made buildings object of research globally. Monitoring energy use had been the practise in most developed nations towards energy efficiency. However, developing nations including Nigeria are lagging behind in this noble objective which was visible in the absence of local energy benchmarks. Moreover, tertiary institutions globally had been admonished to ensure energy efficiency of their buildings as part of their corporate responsibilities. Meanwhile studies have revealed lack of empirical studies on energy use, most especially buildings in tertiary institutions in Nigeria where bulk metering is the usual practice thereby; making energy consumption of individual building remains unknown. Based on this premise, this study had assessed the operational energy performance of three administrative office buildings in Federal University, Polytechnic and College of Education in Niger state, Nigeria. The study was exploratory in nature via case study approach in the absence of energy bills by simple energy audit exercise and data was analysed using descriptive statistics. The findings revealed that none of the buildings had been audited before or took advantages of renewable energy but shared commonalities in terms of building parameters and sources of energy. Furthermore, energy end-uses disaggregation shown that cooling loads accounted for more than 45% of annual energy use, which was in accordance with global reports on similar buildings. Also, the derived Energy Use Index of 181.34 KWh/m2/yr was above the global best practices of 128 KWh/m2/yr and 130 KWh/m2/yr according to South Africa Building Regulation SANS 10400-XA and Chartered Institution of Building and Service Engineers benchmark respectively. These results implied that the buildings are not energy efficient. Therefore, the need for effective monitoring of energy consumption by sub-metering and auditing of buildings in tertiary institutions and orientation should be given proper attention.