Edinburgh Napier University

  Over the years building energy performance has become a predominant concern for owners and real estate managers. The focus is usually on residential buildings but in the last twenty years an interest in non-domestic buildings has emerged in the UK. Benchmarks can generally be found at UK scale, although often restricted to England and Wales. This paper aims to provide benchmarks for the Scottish non-domestic building stock as part of the City of Edinburgh Council estate. In this research, the selected sample includes energy data and calculated carbon emissions of 199 buildings. The deciding parameters were the energy use intensity (kWh/m2) and the use and age of buildings. The last two allowed the creation of six clusters in which to group buildings of similar occupancy patterns in four age categories from the 16th to the 21st century. The main findings reveal the predominance of an educational buildings cluster in terms of floor area (72%), number of buildings (70%), carbon emissions (68% of about 42,000 tons of CO2), and energy consumption (61% of the 38.4 MWh of electricity consumed, and 73% of the 117.4 MWh of natural gas consumed). These levels of consumption highlight the energy saving potential for schools: 186 kWh/m2/year on average, in comparison with the European average of 100 kWh/m2/year for thermal end-use energy.