A proposal of energy performance indicators for a reliable benchmark of swimming facilities

The main research question tackled in this work is which energy performance indicator should be used to benchmark energy usage in swimming facilities. After the design and administration of a survey, data from 43 Norwegian swimming facilities were collected. A quality assurance process was applied to the collected data, which were than stored in a database, resulting in 176 datasets. A correlation and multiple linear regression analysis were carried out to identify (i) to what extent a number of independent variables characterising swimming facilities are singularly related to energy performance and (ii) to what extent the identified independent variables can together explain the variation in energy performance. Unlike in residential and commercial buildings, climate does not drive the total energy performance of swimming facilities. Instead, overall water usage of the facility was observed to be most strongly correlated with the energy usage, followed by the number of visitors attending in a year, the usable area of the facility and the water surface of the pool(s). It is difficult to obtain accurate values for any of these variables except for the water surface. A multiple linear regression analysis showed that the number of visitors is the variable that explains most of the variation in the energy performance of swimming facilities. Therefore, the authors conclude that, for benchmarking purposes, the energy usage of swimming facilities, shall be preferably normalised with respect to the number of visitors. If no reliable visitor count is available, then water surface can be used.