Challenges towards renewable energy : an exploratory study from the Arabian Gulf region

Considering the importance of energy for social and economic development, access to clean, affordable and reliable energy has been adopted as one of the United Nations sustainable development goals that all countries aim to achieve by 2030. However, much of the world's energy is still produced from fossil fuels and thus the progress towards clean and renewable energy is slow. This paper explores the key challenges towards renewable energy in Gulf Cooperation Council countries blessed with plenty of oil and gas reserves. The key challenges identified through literature review were ranked using a quantitative approach through the data collected from a selective sample across the six countries. These challenges in order of importance were found to be policies and regulations, manpower experience and competencies, renewable energy education, public awareness, costs and incentives for renewable energy and government commitment. The findings could be helpful to decision makers and government organisations in the region to develop strategies to overcome these identified challenges

Integrated framework to manage building's sustainability efficiency, design features and building envelope

The construction industry is facing a challenge to move towards a more sustainable sector with energy-efficient buildings and sustainable design features. Building design and construction process are conditioned by numerous sustainability regulations and assessment measures. With the increasing use of building simulations, the potential of improving design features and promoting efficient construction has become a routine practice, starting at early stages of design and carried out throughout the life cycle of a building. Nevertheless, the construction process is currently lacking the presence of integrated systems that allow dynamic compliance checking of design features with building regulations using instant results from building simulation tools. Such integrated system requires access to regulatory compliance data and appropriate information exchange mechanism between building information model, regulatory requirements and building simulations tools. This paper will present an initiative for developing an integrated system that facilitates managing building performance dynamically through an appropriate information management process combining sustainability regulatory and building simulations with building information modeling. The paper will present a valid implementation results of compliance checking against some criteria of BREEAM assessment process. The quantitative analysis of the results revealed that more than 50% of compliance requirements cannot be fully automated and still requires users input. This is due to the fact that the IFC data model used for data extraction lacks a representation of certain domains of data

Assessing buildings’ adaptability at early design stages

Buildings should be able to change and be adaptable according to newer requirements; otherwise, premature demolition can occur. The adaptability or lack of it in buildings affects the environment, society, and economy. If existing buildings are better-taken care of and re-used, their life expectancy extends, and fewer resources are used. Flexible and adaptable buildings enable not just recycling and reusing existing buildings, they allow upcycle of these buildings into urban regeneration projects. Additionally, buildings? early design phases are critical for their sustainability. If adequate measures are taken at these stages, sustainability concerns are overcome in a much easier, faster, economical, and efficient way. This paper describes the importance of addressing sustainable criteria during early design, with special attention to adaptability criteria. Based on the concept of open building and aiming to promote ease of dismantling and adjustability, the evaluation proposed comprises two sub-indicators: flexibility provision and (ii) adaptability capacity. The first accounts for design strategies to accommodate change, through the transformation capacity. The second aims to quantify the availability of space to be changed and adapted according to the occupiers? needs, following the open building concept by accounting the built area available to be transformed. By considering these aspects at the early design, it is possible to obtain buildings that live longer with lower environmental impact. Higher transformation ability means buildings can easier accommodate new requirements; greater disassembly potential can be achieved enabling replacement, reuse or recycling for the buildings? materials and components, thus promoting buildings? sustainability and resilience.This research work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) through POPH/FSE and QREN, funded by the European Social Fund, through an individual doctoral fellowship [SFRH/BD/76043/2011] and by EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation – Horizon 2020 [grant agreement n. 642384].info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio