Over the past few decades, the booming global population, growing cities and changing climate have brought global attention to the need to build energy-efficient and sustainable buildings.

Evidence suggests that residential energy use increased during the pandemic. But what do we know about how people impact energy use in buildings they don’t occupy?

In a recent paper, our team at the Human-Building Interaction Lab uncovered that empty buildings consume more energy than we thought.

Buildings consume more energy when empty or partially occupied for extended periods because they are designed to depend on human interactions.

Our research found that empty buildings consume more energy in colder climates because the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems need to compensate for lost heat usually generated by the daily activities of people in these buildings.

A primary reason behind the increase in energy use is static schedules that are used for designing buildings. Static schedules provide an hourly estimate of the number of people that would occupy these buildings. While these schedules are incorporated into the building design, they do not consider the actual number of people or their movements in buildings. As a consequence, our buildings were not able to adapt to emptiness during lockdowns.

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