Energy Efficiency in a New University Campus: Preliminary Findings

One of Malaysia’s national energy policy’s objectives is to promote efficient utilization of energy and the elimination of wasteful and non-productive patterns of energy consumption. The government wishes to intensify energy efficiency (EE) initiatives in a broad range of areas, including in government buildings. University Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP), a Malaysian public institution of higher learning, has been chosen for an action research in the implementation of an energy efficiency program, in line with the government’s aspiration. This highly populated organization was an ideal selection for an energy consumption and silent waste research. Research objective was to identify areas of possible energy waste within the Campus. To achieve the objective, 2 projects were selected- one was to reduce energy use of chillers and the other was to find if there is any wastage with wrong setting of luminous flux in specific areas. For the first project, the staging method was adopted, where chillers will be loaded with 15 minutes intervals and for the second, luminous flux was set according to government body’s requirement to attain energy saving as initial stage findings showed that luminous flux setting was more than what is required. The results from just these 2 projects demonstrated, that UniMAP was able to save approximately 53,000 kWh of electricity within the research duration. From the preliminary results, it is apparent that more energy wastage analysis within the campus should be carried out in order to maximize potential savings that can be achieved in the future.