Greeting everyone! I am doing energy Audit of Wild Basin building as truly believe in the clean and effective use of energy.
As an intern at Wild Basin, my responsibility is to conduct an energy audit and prepare an action plan for Wild Basin building to be energy efficient of Wild Basin. The consumption of energy is directly proportional to the age of the building. Wild Basin is a research station and its building is 25 years old and the energy audit of Wild Basin building was never done before. With the rapid development of the public building, the consumption of energy has increased rapidly too. To ensure safe, reliable, reasonable and sustainable energy system for future energy efficiency is an important key.
As Austin is moving toward net-zero community by 2050, Wild Basin wants to make improvement in its energy use. Wild Basin has a solar panel and portion of electricity used by Wild Basin is renewable but still, director of Wild Basin is really excited to take further action to reduce the negative impact on the environment. As an intern, I have collected data of historical billing data, and prepared energy performance summary so far. For historical billing data, I have looked at total monthly electricity consumption in kWh (kilowatt per hour), the actual demand of electricity in kW, total monthly cost, and average kWh use per day of utility bills from July 2016 to January 2018. Energy performance summary includes the report of total energy used, cost of energy use from July 2016 to Jan 2018, and trends of energy use during that time period. After collecting billing data I did analysis and saw some unique trend in energy usage as a portion of electricity produced by the solar panel is used. The general trend of energy usage in public building is that the electricity demand is higher during summer and lower during winter, but Wild Basin electricity consumption is higher during winter and lower during summer. For instance, the total actual demand was 32kW in December 2017 and in July 2017 it was 13 kW. The reason is understandable that during summer sunlight is abundant so the electricity production is higher from the solar panel as result electricity consumption is lower and electricity production is lower during winter (sunlight is scarce) so electricity consumption is higher.
My next step is to calculate EUI (energy use intensity) and conduct a walk-through analysis to identify the where energy is wasted, generally, a low EUI use signifies good energy performance. I will further calculate the carbon footprint of all the energy used at Wild Basin. After completing analysis I will develop an achievable goal that Wild Basin will follow to improve its energy use and reduce waste of energy. So far Wild Basin is on a good track in term of being environmentally friendly.