Towards Achieving SDGs in Social Housing in the UAE: From Conventional to BIPV Houses

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has tailored its own local agenda for realizing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. This Agenda includes providing clean sustainable energy and achieving sustainable communities. In accordance with these efforts, this research aims at, first, exploring an appropriate method of integrating photovoltaic panels in existing and future social single-family housing in the UAE without compromising the architectural style and the identity of the original designs. Second, it aims at assessing the sufficiency of the generated electricity through this proposed Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) system. A frequently developed single-family house model in social housing projects in the UAE was selected to undertake the research investigations and the most suitable architectural elements of its envelope were defined for accommodating the integrated PV panels. Afterwards, a complete set of to-scale BIPV panel designs tailored to fit with the defined architectural elements of the selected house was prepared. The dimensions and areas of the BIPV panels were defined in these designs based on their selected type. After considering the efficiency of the selected type of the BIPV Panels and figuring out the expected system losses, the PVWatts Calculator was used for simulating the expected electricity output in kilowatt hours (kWh) for the four main orientations of the house as well as the overall average electricity output. The results of the yearly electricity output were very close regardless of the orientation of the house with the total average output exceeds the estimated yearly average electricity consumption of this house model. This is obviously indicating the potential efficiency of the proposed BIPV system, especially with the continuous decrease in the capital cost of the PV panels and their increasing efficiency. The proposed BIPV system might be also considered as an efficient alternative to the currently applied rooftop PV solutions in the UAE.