Energy benchmarking and ventilation related energy saving potentials for small and medium sized enterprises in Greater Toronto area

In the past several years, energy benchmarking has become a very popular tool for the estimation of energy consumption and overall performance of buildings. More recently, industrial energy benchmarking has attracted attention all over the world, due to ever-increasing energy demands. Industrial facility ventilation is one of the most overlooked components in terms of overall industrial sector energy consumption. Therefore, a proper assessment and manage of energy can lead to a great reduction of energy usage, as shown in different small and medium industrial plant case studies. Although several articles and reports that have previously discussed ventilation analysis of industrial facilities in Ontario, energy benchmarking has never been conducted on ventilation. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to present a detailed energy benchmarking method and analyzing energy consumption and savings based on ventilation energy consumption. An energy benchmarking analysis was conducted in different small to medium sized facilities in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), based on ventilation analysis. It was determined from the analysis that the typical and inefficient performing facilities can reduce average of 9% of their total natural gas consumption from total ventilation, 25% from transmission heat loss and 10% from infiltration loss compared to the top performing facility among all the audited facilities in this study.