Abstract

Nine years ago, Egypt experienced one of its most serious energy crises for decades. Hence, the Egyptian government and the Ministry of Electricity and Renewable Energy (MoERE) are committed to maximizing Egypt's renewable energy potential to meet the growing demand and to enhance the environmental and climate footprint of the power sector. To stimulate the development of renewable energy, Egypt has introduced an overarching regulatory framework to secure 20% of its energy generation from renewable sources by 2022. Over the past few decades, worldwide population expansion, economic growth, and prompt industrialization development caused substantial rises in building energy consumption bills. The residential and commercial buildings' energy consumption is between 20-40% of total energy utilization [1,2]. Hence, cutting building energy expenditure, building materials, and energy technologies must be boosted. While beneficial in many ways, constraints exist concerning the reserves that can be attained by renovating buildings, with findings average energy-conserving deficits to level from 14 % to 98 %. Aswan Governorate has the highest ambient temperature and solar radiation in Egypt. Moreover, Aswan is considered as Africa and the Middle East energy capital, as it has the largest solar PV farm in Banban city. However, the energy requirements of the buildings and the indoor thermal comfort are very sensitive in harsh climates such as the Aswan government that has tough and harsh weather conditions during summertime. Since the façades essentially are involved in the building's heating and cooling processes, buildings' façades retrofitting is considered as an efficient technique to reduce cooling and heating requirements in already instituted buildings. In this project, a photovoltaic separate panels building envelope will be constructed in the Aswan branch of the AASTMT campus as a case study. The proposed system provides adaptive energy and thermal comfort management of harsh climate such as Aswan towards zero-net-energy construction (ZNEB). The new plan addresses multi-disciplinary research areas and requires a mix of numerous promising ideas for energy and construction. First, during the current work, the condition of photovoltaic solar energy technologies will be applied as the thermal insulation of the building façade. This is one of the powerful ways to convey more indoor thermal comfort to decrease energy consumption. The installed photovoltaic panels in the building façade are off-grid electricity sources which guarantees an extra reduction of the electricity bills. By the current project, solutions will be provided regarding the main challenge of Egyptian regions with a harsh climate. An innovative building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) will be employed to produce electricity and provide satisfactory indoor thermal comfort. Moreover, a blueprint of this promising combination will be completed by applying analytical, experimental, and mathematical work approaches to complete the framework and introducing it the Egyptian society. In conclusion, the proposed study aims to design and construct an energy-efficient, economical building for thermal comfort and energy saving. An innovative BIPV for the NZEB and zero-carbon buildings would be in operation without relying on conventional energy sources. This latest integration is of direct relevance to the existing call priority field of concern at present (i.e., energy and building cooling systems).