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.