IMPROVING THE ENERGY PERFORMANCE OF FUTURE SAUDI MINISTRY OF HOUSING BUILDING DESIGNS TO ACHIEVE THE COUNTRY'S FUTURE CLIMATE CHANGE TARGETS

Abstract

The Saudi Ministry of Housing (M.of.H) has changed its strategies for achieving the 2030 Vision of Saudi Arabia, which plans to raise housing ownership to 52%. It has been boosted since the Real Estate Development Fund's investment has been around 250 billion SAR for 480,000 new homes (M.of.H, 2016). Saudi Arabia currently consumes 73,207,896,971 kWh per year, while the Saudi population is 32552336 which means that the Saudi energy consumption is 9401 kWh per capita per year (GAS, 2017). This rate is very high when comper it with international rates such as China, Spain, and United Kingdom which consumed respectively 3927, 5356, and 5130 kWh per year (IEA statistics, 2014). The Saudi government subsidized the electricity by19,996,954,830 SAR in 2017 (GAS, 2017a). Furthermore, most environmental reports have shown that future temperature will increase considerably. Scenarios indicate that the outside temperature will rise by 4 °C by the end of the 21 century in Saudi Arabia(IPCC, 2014b). At present, the Housing Ministry houses are all identical without considering local building characteristics and passive strategies to reduce energy consumption. With the increasing number of units to be provided, there is an excellent opportunity to improve these buildings to significantly reduce energy consumption and mitigate future climate change impacts in the region. Passive strategies used in vernacular Architecture are a great example of of sustainable designs that can stand against the challenging weather. The Najd region is the largest in Saudi Arabia and and this research will focus on this region. It is envisaged that the approach and findings from this study can be expanded to other regions in Saudi Arabia. In order to create proper optimal strategies, this study will focus on four main aspects in the methodologies: selecting the case studies' buildings, monitoring, analysis, and evaluation of selected buildings. The field monitoring lasted for 60 days and was recorded in summer period to measure real weather data. The four case studies in two different climate zones illustrate the differences between the vernacular and contemporary houses in two criteria: (building envelope, design techniques). Two simulation programs were used in this research to investigate the effectiveness of selected passive strategies on vernacular and contemporary houses. The research concentrated on the passive strategies that do not require a radical change in the new house design and are compatible with the new Saudi Building Code. The research confirmed that adapting traditional passive strategies will significantly influence two factors: outdoor micro-climate and energy consumption. The result shows that the contemporary house (ministry of housing’s buildings) decreased the total annual energy consumption by more than 21%by adapting traditional passive strategies. The selected processes will directly influence the micro-climate in the Najd region by decreasing temperature by 1.5 °C and increasing the Humidity by about 10% in the Summer period. Additionally, even though climate change has led to an increase, implementing passive strategies to the current contemporary houses can help neutralise future climate change impact by at least 35% by 2050–2080 while also decreasing cooling energy. The optimum design solutions were assessed financially using two different financial feasibility methods: the payback period and present net worth. Both ways approved the feasibility of using these strategies in the contemporary house except for decreasing the electricity fee.