Towards sustainable commercial-office buildings: Harnessing the power of solar panels, electric vehicles, and smart charging for enhanced energy efficiency and environmental responsibility

Abstract

The value of reducing energy consumption in buildings has increased worldwide. This is because the consumption of fossil fuels in a building is as much as in other industries, also among buildings, the consumption of commercial-office buildings has a higher energy consumption; Therefore, the adoption of energy efficiency techniques in the construction and operation of buildings will play an essential role in creating sustainable cities in the future, and for this reason, green building standards such as IgCC, ASHRAE 189.1 and LEED are expanding. At the same time the advancement of technologies such as electric cars and solar cells, incredibly transparent solar cells for generating electricity are being witnessed. In this research, based on building energy simulation techniques, a commercial-office building has been investigated based on green building standards, considering the presence of electric cars and transparent solar cells. This research shows that the building with two scenarios of solar panels on the roof will be reduced by 9% and with transparent panels for electricity production by 18%. Also, the return rate of the first scenario is five years and nine months. The return rate of the second scenario is approximately six years and two months, which will decrease to 2 months and 20 days for the first scenario and three years and three months for the second scenario with the implementation of government incentive policies. Another finding was obtained through the intelligentization of electric car charging costs. It showed that if electric car charging stations are used in the building in three different states, including buildings without solar panels, building with the presence of solar panels only on the roof, and building with solar panels on the roof and transparent solar panels on the windows is 10%, 20% and 30% less than the cheapest commercial electric car charging station.