Prediction of the Energy Consumption of School Buildings

The energy consumption of a constructed facility is a primary concern as a result of its impact on the total energy expenditure. It has been found that up to 70% of the power consumption in Saudi Arabia are caused by building structures and air conditioning (AC). Energy consumption in government-constructed buildings constitutes a considerable ≈13% of the consumption of the total energy in Saudi Arabia. Therefore, the government of Saudi Arabia initiated the Saudi Energy Efficiency Program (SEEP) that goals to lower the domestic energy severity by roughly 30% by 2030. This paper introduces a study carried out in Eastern Province in Saudi Arabia to identify factors influencing the consumption of energy in school facilities (which are built of concrete in hot and humid climate zones), investigate the correlation between those factors and their impacts on the consumption of energy in school facilities, and finally, develop a prediction model for the energy consumption of school facilities. The study was based on the utilization of 352 real-world datasets of energy consumption of operating schools across Eastern Province in Saudi Arabia. The developed energy prediction model considers eleven identified factors that influence the consumption of energy of constructed schools. The identified factors were utilized as input variables to build the model. A systematic search among different neural network (NN) design architectures was conducted to identify the optimal network model. Validation of the developed model on eight real-world cases demonstrated that the accuracy of the developed model was about 87.5%. Moreover, the findings of this study indicate that the weakest correlation between the input variables was recorded as −0.015 between “type of school” and “AC capacity,” while the strongest correlation was recorded as 0.95 between the variables of “number of classrooms” and “total air-conditioned area (sqm),” followed by “total air-conditioned area (sqm)” and “number of students,” which was recorded as 0.90. It is worth noting that “AC capacity” was the most significant predictor, which increased exponentially for high values of energy consumption, followed by “total school roof area.” The study also found that the age of the schools had a very small impact on energy consumption, although the age of the schools varied from 11 to 51 years. This was probably due to a good maintenance system applied by the Ministry of Education. The implication of the developed prediction model was that the model can be used by the Ministry of Education to predict the energy consumption and its associated cost for public school buildings for the purpose of budget allocation. The model may be utilized as a stand-alone application, or it can be integrated with an existing building information module (BIM)-based system.