Review of Energy Benchmarks in the Northern Ireland Public Estate

Session 5, Paper 3, CIBSE ASHRAE Technical Symposium, Dublin, Ireland, 3-4 April 2014

This paper presents new energy benchmarks for the main types of building across the Northern Ireland public estate. It provides an update to a previous paper1 at the Dublin CIBSE conference in 2000 that presented the first benchmarks for this large and varied non domestic estate. The paper therefore provides an opportunity to see how the benchmarks for some building types have changed over the last 13 years. This is probably the first major study of its kind in the UK with a relatively large sample over such an extended time period.
Benchmarks play a key role in promoting energy efficiency in buildings and are fundamental to the work of building designers, operators and energy managers. The energy benchmarks presented cover 27 types of building based on an analysis of roughly 2,000 properties including offices, schools and libraries. The paper also provides evidence on how building energy consumption is changing over a significant time span. This indicates a general trend of higher electricity consumption and lower fossil fuel consumption in buildings.