Abstract
Energy retrofitting standards and guidelines, together with benefitting from best existing experiences, are effective in retrofitting heritage buildings towards low-carbon emissions. In Downtown Cairo, many heritage buildings are exposed to adaptive reuse practices, after moving to the ‘New Administrative Capital’. Integrating energy saving in said practices has become a crucial aspect. Therefore, the aim of this study is to evaluate a recent retrofitted heritage building called ‘La Viennoise’ as an example of best practice for retrofitting processes in Downtown Cairo. The study carried out a field survey for data gathering. A monitoring-based simulation model was created and calibrated, and the building envelope and energy use were evaluated. The simulation results are presented into two cases. The first includes the original state as a base case, showing a very low building envelope thermal performance. The second includes the current state as an improved case. A comparison of both cases shows that the implemented retrofitting scenarios in the case study effectively improved its building envelope and reduced annual energy consumption, and CO2 emissions. This paper allows further benefit from such example by setting a retrofitting guideline to expand this concept in other buildings with similar conditions to achieve a low carbon-built heritage.
Highlights
The urgent need to implement retrofitting strategies on existing buildings by 2030 is one of the aspects that the Paris Agreement asserts in order to bring down global CO2 global emissions, as it has great potential towards low carbon-emissions [1]
5) Review phase: the outcome of this phase was a final decision by involved experts on concrete technical solutions and detailed planning, this work was approved by the National Organization of Urban Harmony (NOUH) and the municipality as explained later
The simulation results indicated that building envelope performance of the base case was very low, especially the exterior windows, which led to higher electricity consumption for cooling
Summary
The urgent need to implement retrofitting strategies on existing buildings by 2030 is one of the aspects that the Paris Agreement asserts in order to bring down global CO2 global emissions, as it has great potential towards low carbon-emissions [1]. Built heritage constitutes a large portion of existing buildings in different countries [2]. In last decade, the number of retrofitted heritage buildings and scientific publications of addressing them have increased, in Italy [3]. Research projects such as Energy Efficiency for EU Historic Districts’ Sustainability (EFFESUS), and standards such as the European Standard, EN 16883:2017 have flourished [4, 5]. Environmental certification protocols such as the Green Building Council of Italy has developed a new tool called “GBC Historic Building®” [6]. ASHRAE Guideline 34 has been published in 2019, providing advice on processes and practices of energy retrofitting in historic buildings [7]. In 2019 Herrera-Avellanosa et al highlighted the fact that “despite the number of resources and efforts spent on standardisation in recent
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