Green building design in Egypt from cost and energy perspectives

Abstract

Sustainable concepts in building designs have potential to enhance building performance and to reduce operating cost. With investors in developing economies overlooking all considerations except profit, this paper aims at promoting green construction in Egypt by presenting possible savings that investors could earn. The paper introduces an integrated framework to allow building design stemming from basic sustainable approaches. The framework can function as an optimization/simulation platform to automatically improve building designs. Following the framework principles, a model was developed that functions through four modules: a System Builder to create various envelope systems alternatives; a Building Integrator to form a complete design; a Design Evaluator to assess costs and energy; and Design Adaptation that allows optimization and simulation. The model represents a comprehensive yet easy application tool for cost and energy trade-off analyses that suits early design stage. A comparative analysis showed that green designs exhibited lifecycle and annual energy savings reaching 16.3% and 50%, respectively. A sensitivity analysis was performed to show the relationship between changes in electricity prices and percentage saving in lifecycle cost, optimum design and payback period. Furthermore, simulation of possible building designs is conducted to offer trade-off comparison between initial and energy costs of different designs.