Reducing the Total Energy Consumption of an Existing Office Building through Alternative Construction Parameters

The sudden increase in the energy consumption trends attracted the attention of many aspects, depletion of energy resources, and multiple environmental issues such as CO2 emissions, global warming, and climate change. One of the most important challenge of future buildings is the reduction of energy consumptions in all their life phases, from construction to demolition. The building sector consumes from 30 to 40 % of the world global energy, 40 % of total resources, 25 % of the worldwide water, and around 30 % of the Carbon dioxide emission. To reduce energy consumption in the new designed buildings, the application of an energy efficiency concept is required. This paper aims to characterize a real case study of an office building in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) using energy simulation software representing the alternative parameters in terms of wall, roof, window to wall ratio, and HVAC system to find the best-optimized case achieving low energy consumption. The energy performance of the office building was calculated using the e-Quest simulation tool recording the impact of each parameter on the overall energy consumed by the building. The component that contributes more to decreasing the energy was the window to wall ratio with 43%, followed by a new wall structure with 23%, then a modified HVAC system with 18 SEER value with 22%. The results showed that the optimized value of the above parameters decreased the energy consumption from 167.380*1000 kWh to 97.57*1000 kWh which is 41% lower than the base case, with energy savings of ~70.00*1000 kWh per year.