PhD

Buildings are a contributor to increasing electricity demand in Egypt, straining the existing supply network causing economic and social impacts. Current initiatives that aim to improve building performance include the adoption of international standards. Existing Egyptian buildings performance is not understood making the impact of current initiatives uncertain. The main aim of this thesis is to better understand current energy performance and Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) for Egyptian office buildings and capture this knowledge in methods to inform new Egyptian policy. Performance of current Egyptian office buildings was assessed through a 59 office energy survey and a more detailed energy and indoor environmental investigation for a case study office. The case study office was representative of the most common type found in the survey which has natural ventilation and locally controlled cooling systems. Naturally ventilated offices with local cooling were found to use less than 50% of the energy of fully centrally serviced offices. A two-step process to capture the observed performance in a representative model and input parameter set is elaborated based on first creating a calibrated model for the case study office then adjusting this model to be more representative of the broader survey data. The representative model uses the appropriate thermal comfort standard Selected by comparing observations against various pre-existing comfort standards. Uncertainties are captured in the formulation of the model input parameter sets. The representative model is then used to investigate the impacts of parameters including location, weather, building envelope, occupancy, behaviour, and installed systems including Heating, Ventilation, & Air Conditioning (HVAC) strategy. HVAC strategy installed system efficiencies and occupant behaviour was identified as the three most influential parameters. Possible policy measures to promote system energy efficiencies and encourage adoption of energy conscious behaviour are proposed. Together these can reduce the energy used in the naturally ventilated and locally cooled offices by 50%. Trade-offs between energy use and IEQ are discussed. In summary, this research gives new insight into energy, indoor environmental conditions and behaviour in Egyptian office buildings. A new method for defining a representative model capturing uncertainties in input data sets is elaborated. The representative model’s use to identify the impacts of various parameters for the Egyptian context is illustrated through a combinatorial parametric study. Insights useful to inform future Egyptian policy were proposed. The methodology developed in this work has applicability to other contexts and building categories.