Abstract
Green building regulations in the United Arab Emirates are required to obtain building permits so that future construction projects can create a sustainable living environment. Emirates such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Sharjah have specific green building regulations, whereas other emirates follow Abu Dhabi’s regulatory criteria. Previous work fails to present a techno-economic cross-code analysis for various green building regulations in the UAE by evaluating energy and water performance. A case study using an existing high-rise green office building was formulated using the Integrated Environmental Solution: Virtual Environment (IES-VE) platform and the U.S. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (U.S. LEED) water consumption evaluation tool to study its energy and water performance, respectively. The archived results were used to devise an economic study based on the discounted cash flow technique. The principal findings of this research allowed us to determine a cross-code analysis and propose cost-effective trade-offs. These will aid the consultants and contractors in choosing appropriate green building regulations in the UAE by highlighting the potential of each parameter within green building regulations in terms of energy, water, and economic performance.
Highlights
Energy efficiency measures in the built environment sector are considered the low-hanging fruit because prior research indicates that the building sector consumes 80% of overall energy demand in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and 40% across the globe [1,2]
The results show that ASHRAE has the smallest investment, and Trakhees outperforms the others in terms of the internal rate of return (IRR) value at the end of 10 years, as this code has a positive effect on the energy utility index (EUI) index compared to the rest
To propose an energy-effective trade-off, a strategy to control energy performance was determined by evaluating a variable influence diagram
Summary
Energy efficiency measures in the built environment sector are considered the low-hanging fruit because prior research indicates that the building sector consumes 80% of overall energy demand in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and 40% across the globe [1,2]. These energy efficiency standards are promulgated within green building regulations, but constructing green buildings requires higher investment capital than ordinary buildings. Evaluating the technical performance of green building regulations in compliance with economic viability explores a balanced option for introducing (or revising) the benchmarking criteria that may be adopted by various stakeholders [3]. This work proposes cost-effective trade-offs by performing a cross-code analysis based on technical and economic performance
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