Adapting Traditional Passive Strategies within Contemporary House to Decrease High energy consumption Impact in Nejd Region, Saudi Arabia

Abstract Saudi Arabia has been identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as one of the strongest warming projected regions which indicates a serious future impact if no radical change is made in energy consumption [1]. The Saudi Electricity Company indicated that electricity consumption for 2017 is 204,597 GW [2]. Residential buildings have used 55% of the annual energy consumed in Saudi Arabia [3]. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the efforts that can be made to reduce this extreme consumption of energy by using simple traditional design techniques that were used in traditional buildings in the Nejd region, Saudi Arabia. The Nejd region was chosen because it represents the majority of Saudi’s topography and weather, and is recognized as the largest region in the country with the biggest population size [4]. Two houses were monitored during the summer of 2018. One represents a traditional old house while the other represents a contemporary house built by the Ministry of Housing (M.of.H) in Riyadh City. The two case studies provided valuable data for further analysis as the architectural design for the houses were analysed to distinguish the architectural features and weaknesses. Two models for the two cases were created using DesignBuilder and validated against measured data. The computational models were then used for dynamic thermal simulation, and used to estimate the energy consumption for the selected cases. The integrated passive strategies in traditional house were analysed, and compared it with a contemporary house. The result shows a 52.3% differences in annual energy consumption between the traditional house with contemporary house. In addition, the simulation result illustrates a 24.3% reduction in the annual energy consumption for the contemporary house is achieved by applying the passive strategies to the house design.</jats:p