Energy-efficient Renovation and Building
Al Balqa Applied University (BAU) demonstrates its commitment to energy-efficient renovation and building through a combination of official policy and tangible, large-scale projects. This dual approach directly addresses this sub-indicator, which measures a university’s formal policy on ensuring all renovations and new builds adhere to energy efficiency standards.
BAU demonstrates its commitment through the following key initiatives:
- Policy and Strategy: BAU has an overarching sustainable continuous improvement policy that aims to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into its strategic and action plans. This includes a focus on energy efficiency in infrastructure.
- Smart and Environmentally Friendly Buildings: The university is committed to ensuring all new buildings are smart and environmentally friendly. This commitment is evidenced by recent agreements to establish new faculties, such as the Faculty of Artificial Intelligence, which will incorporate state-of-the-art facilities and smart technologies like sensors to remotely monitor and manage systems and lighting, enhancing efficiency.
- Existing Building Upgrades (Implied Efficiency): While much attention is often given to new construction, BAU is proactively addressing its existing building stock to enhance efficiency. A key related initiative is the implementation of ‘smart building’ concepts across the campus, with more than half of BAU’s existing facilities classified as such. This strategic focus is primarily aimed at reducing energy costs by enabling the early detection of equipment faults and providing precise tracking of energy consumption within these older structures.
- Renewable Energy Integration: Though not strictly “renovation” BAU’s major step towards sustainability directly impacts on the overall energy performance of its facilities. The university has launched a massive solar energy project at the Princess Tasnim bint Ghazi Agricultural Research Station with a production capacity of 7 megawatts. This project is cited as the largest solar energy project among Jordanian universities, reinforcing the university’s goal for 100% energy independence and significantly reducing reliance on conventional energy sources, which ultimately lowers the overall energy demand from the grid for the campus buildings.
These actions show that BAU addresses the “Energy-efficient renovation and building” metric by integrating efficiency and smart technology into its new construction plans and leveraging significant renewable energy infrastructure to achieve overall energy sustainability.