Sustainable energy retrofitting for residential buildings in Palestine, a simulation based approach

To tackle the massive drivers of global warming, which are our buildings, especially existing buildings, we need to work on making these buildings more energy efficient. Building retrofitting in Palestine can tackle the issue of energy poverty resulting from a shortage of natural resources and the dependence on imported energy. This paper aims to use energy simulation for typical existing residential buildings to assess the energy saving from a proposed retrofitting program. The most frequently used residential building types were selected for the computer simulation assessment of the energy retrofitting program. The energy use of those selected residential buildings has been identified and a base case has been established as a baseline for the energy retrofitting evaluation. Three levels of retrofitting programs were applied for the selected buildings. A Simulation model was created for the current residential building type using the DesignBuilder tool to evaluate the savings from applying the retrofit program. The simulation has been done for one climate zone in Palestine. The results show that the main energy consumption in the typical households are water heating, room heating, cooling and electric lighting. The results show that level one measures results in a 16.7% reduction in energy consumption due to reducing the heating and cooling. Level two results in a 13.3% reduction in energy consumption for heating, cooling and lighting. At level three further 28.9% reduction in the total energy consumption can be achieved for heating, cooling and water heating. The total saving from energy consumption can reach up to 58.9% of the total energy consumed in existing residential buildings by applying the three levels of the energy retrofitting plan.