Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Energy Use at the University of Almeria (Spain)

Mehdi Chihib, Esther Salmerón-Manzano, Mimoun Chourak, Alberto-Jesus Perea-Moreno and Francisco Manzano-Agugliaro
Additional contact information
Mehdi Chihib: Department of Engineering, CEIA3, University of Almeria, 04120 Almeria, Spain
Esther Salmerón-Manzano: Faculty of Law, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), Av. de la Paz, 137, 26006 Logroño, Spain
Mimoun Chourak: Mechanics and Applied Mathematics Department, Industrial and Seismic Engineering Research Team, National School of Applied Sciences of Oujda, Mohammed First University, 60000 Oujda, Morocco
Alberto-Jesus Perea-Moreno: Departamento de Física Aplicada, Radiología y Medicina Física, Universidad de Córdoba, Campus de Rabanales, 14071 Córdoba, Spain
Francisco Manzano-Agugliaro: Departamento de Física Aplicada, Radiología y Medicina Física, Universidad de Córdoba, Campus de Rabanales, 14071 Córdoba, Spain

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-21

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused chaos in many sectors and industries. In the energy sector, the demand has fallen drastically during the first quarter of 2020. The University of Almeria campus also declined the energy consumption in 2020, and through this study, we aimed to measure the impact of closing the campus on the energy use of its different facilities. We built our analysis based upon the dataset collected during the year 2020 and previous years; the patterns evolution through time allowed us to better understand the energy performance of each facility during this exceptional year. We rearranged the university buildings into categories, and all the categories reduced their electricity consumption share in comparison with the previous year of 2019. Furthermore, the portfolio of categories presented a wide range of ratios that varied from 56% to 98%, the library category was found to be the most influenced, and the research category was found to be the least influenced. This opened questions like why some facilities were influenced more than others? What can we do to reduce the energy use even more when the facilities are closed? The university buildings presented diverse structures that revealed differences in energy performance, which explained why the impact of such an event (COVID-19 pandemic) is not necessarily relevant to have equivalent variations. Nevertheless, some management deficiencies were detected, and some energy savings measures were proposed to achieve a minimum waste of energy.

Keywords: energy consumption; COVID-19; energy savings; energy performance; university buildings; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/11/5843/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/11/5843/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:11:p:5843-:d:560223

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().