Development of an energy audit tool for commercial buildings in Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh as a developing country, is progressing at a fast pace due to the increase in industries and technologies. However, the country has been facing a severe energy crisis for several years to meet the growing needs. Day by day, the gap between energy demand and supply is ramping up. One effective way to minimize the gap is to conduct energy audit in all sectors in regular basis. Energy audit helps to identify the loss, wastage and provides room for improvements in usage. The aim of our thesis work is to perform energy audit in commercial buildings, to find out the energy loss, provide methods and techniques to compensate the loss and to present an energy audit tool. The energy audit tool has been developed by using MS Excel and Macros and it is named as ‘EnergyWise’. ‘EnergyWise’ uses categorization process which enables the energy auditors to calculate the energy loss for three predominant factors of an energy audit. The data entries are facilitated by user forms. The processed data are then automatically summarized and transferred to the spreadsheets. It also generates graphs and pie charts to point the highest energy consumed sector. The thesis also focuses on the energy saving opportunities and the potentials to reduce early operating cost. This is done by replacing conventional lighting and other important equipment with more energy efficient appliances to increase the efficiency. The result of our study showed that, a substantial amount of energy and money can be conserved if thorough energy audit is practiced and executed.