The effects of urban morphology on housing’s energy consumption and generation: A case study of optimizing a residential urban block using a parametric approach in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Abstract

The current increase in global energy consumption is one of the key factors impacting climate change. Developing a sustainable future has become a major concern in most countries in order to assist in climate change mitigation. In Saudi Arabia the residential buildings sector accounts for 52% of the national energy consumption. Massive urbanizations and increasing population cause huge urban construction, which could cause major ecological problems if not done thoughtfully. Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that faced rapid growth in population and urbanization, which enforces the consideration of energy efficiency measures for the built environment sector. Now with the Saudi Vision 2030, a number of programs have been initiated to enhance the infrastructure of the built environment, improve energy performance, and implement sustainable building practices. This paper supports the adaptation of the built environment energy measures by exploring the urban morphology effects on buildings' energy performance. This study examines some urban morphological parameters effects on the energy performance of buildings by an optimization process using a parametric approach. The study uses the software grasshopper, which is a plugin of Rhino and environmental plugins Ladybug and Honeybee. The simulation process was done using Colibri, which is an automatic iterations runner. The optimization parameters considered in this study were; spacing between buildings, street width, aspect ratio, orientation and height ratio. The multi objectives are the highest energy generation, lowest energy consumption, Highest on-site generated energy supply and acceptable average daylight factor. It is found that the different urban morphologies cause up to 35% decrease in energy consumption and 21% increase on energy generation which highlight the importance of early urban design decision on the energy performance of buildings. Correlations between urban morphological parameters and energy performance were identified in addition to the classification of the highest sensitive parameters to allow for a posterization of urban