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Friday, September 6, 2024
April 16, 2020
What happens to an office building’s electricity demand when almost everyone who works there is stuck at home?
The coronavirus pandemic has forced broad swaths of the economy to shut down, as state after state forced nonessential businesses to close. The result has been significant drops in electricity demand in big commercial centers like New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, and forecasts that commercial energy usage across the country will decline by 4.7 percent this year.
But just because a building is almost empty of people doesn’t mean that its energy use drops to nothing. Shutting down key building systems like heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) can lead to unhealthy air or corrosion in boilers and chillers. Emergency lighting and elevators must remain on, as must the servers running the business tasks being carried out by employees at home. Any equipment that was left plugged in when the office closed down will still be using standby power.
Office building energy consumption fell steadily through March and into early April, but it did not fall off a cliff, according to Hatch Data, which monitors 400 million square feet of commercial real estate for more than 250 clients. If anything, it’s surprising that the drop-off was not steeper, Ben Mendelson, chief commercial officer and co-founder, said in an interview last week.
Compared to the first week of March, office building energy consumption fell 5 percent the next week, continued to drop from there, and was 25 percent lower by the first week of April, as the chart below shows.
Hatch believes its data is representative of the country’s office building stock as a whole. The San Francisco-based company was formed in January as a carve-out of the energy intelligence services branch of demand response provider EnerNOC, which was acquired by Enel in 2017.
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