The impact of strong activity disruption on building energetics

Abstract

Evidence shows that biological organisms tend to be more energetically efficient per unit size. These scaling patterns observed in biological organisms have also been observed in the energetic requirements of cities. However, at lower levels of organization where energetic interventions can be more manageable, such as buildings, this analysis has remained more elusive due to the difficulties in collecting fine-grained data. Here, we use the maintenance energy usage in buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2009 to 2024 to analyze energetic trends at the scale of individual buildings and their sensitivity to strong external perturbations. We find that, similar to the baseline metabolism of biological organisms, large buildings are on average $24\%$ more energetically efficient per unit size than smaller buildings. Because it has become debatable how to better measure the efficiency of buildings, this scaling pattern naturally establishes a baseline efficiency for buildings, where deviations from the mean would imply a more or less efficient building than the baseline according to volume. This relative efficiency progressively increased to $34\%$ until 2020. However, the strong activity disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic acted as a major shock, removing this trend and leading to a reversal to the expected $24\%$ baseline level. This suggests that energetic adaptations are contingent on relatively stable conditions.