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Energy Use and Costs in Texas Schools and Hospitals
Abstract
Procedures are presented for documenting and graphically presenting the monthly and
annual energy use and costs for schools and hospitals. Collected data include monthly
electrical energy consumed, monthly total electrical cost, monthly electrical demand
charges, monthly natural gas consumed, monthly total natural gas costs, and total facility
conditioned area. From this data, the monthly and annual energy use and cost performance
of the facility is presented with the calculation of 10 use and cost indices including
electrical- gas use/area, electrical - gas cost/area, electrical - gas unit cost, demand cost/area,
and total energy use-cost/area. The results are presented both on tables and bar charts
showing the monthly values for each parameter. Data was collected and presented for
energy use and cost for over 60 schools in four school districts and for 35 hospitals/health
care facilities in the state. All of the performance parameters showed a wide variation of
values of the various performance indices among the participating institutions. For
participating elementary schools, the annual electrical energy use/area ranged from 5.52 to
16.84 kwh/ft^2, the gas use from 9,363 to 66,639 Btu/ft^2, the electrical cost/area from 0.29
to 0.98 $/ft^2 the gas cost/area from 0.03 to 0.24 $/ft^2, and the total energy cost/area from
0.37 to 1.12 $/ft^2. For hospitals the annual electrical electrical energy use/area ranged from
1 1.67 to 61.89 kwh/ft^2, the gas use from 26,192 to 418,267 Btu/ft^2, the electrical cost/area
from 0.58 to 2.98 $/ft^2 the gas cost/area from 0.16 to 2.23 $/ft^2, and the total energy
costlier from 0.82 to 3.86 $/ft^2. As expected, both the magnitudes of the energy indices
and the range of variation were greater for the hospitals than for the schools. However, the
gas use and costs for the hospitals seemed to generally fall within a more narrow range
with only a few widely varying values as in comparison to values for the electric use and
costs which were more generally scattered. It is noted that the conditioned area of the
hospitals varied by a factor of approximately 42 while for the schools the areas varied by a
factor of 2.3. The unit electrical total cost for the hospitals varied from approximately 2.2
$/kwh to a maximum of approximately 9 cents/kwh while the gas unit costs ranged from a
minimum of approximately 2.5 $/mcf to a maximum of 7.1 $/mcf.
Citation
Dunn, J. R. (1998). Energy Use and Costs in Texas Schools and Hospitals. Energy Systems Laboratory (http://esl.tamu.edu); Texas A&M University (http://www.tamu.edu). Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /6758.