Incorporation Of Low Energy Strategies To The Design Process

In a global context,about 36%of the final energy usage and carbon dioxide（CO₂）emissions of almost 40%is recorded by the buildings sector.Due to this fact and the ongoing energy scarcity in Nigeria,this research work investigated the incorporation of low energy strategies to the design process,to improve the energy efficiency of office buildings in Abuja,Nigeria.It included the study of design process and methods,the comprehension of building energy performance,low energy strategies and assessment of architectural design variables that can be utilised to incorporate low energy strategies in building design and determine the significance of improved performances in the site context.This research originally adopted a case study approach that required fieldwork study and walk through energy audit of two office building in Abuja,where their physical component,energy sources and energy end uses was obtained.This enabled the deduction of the energy performance of the office buildings via widely adopted performance indicators,the energy use index（EUI）and energy cost index（ECI）.The output revealed that the average disaggregated energy use of air-conditioning was 58%,while for office equipment,25%;lighting,13.5%;and building services,3.5%.This affirms the need for cooling because of the climatic disposition of the study site and also potential of energy savings by minimising cooling needs.Utilising a computer base simulation program IES-VE（energy tool）,nine design variable（derived from literature for low energy strategies applicable for hot and dry climate which relates to the research site climatic disposition）were analysed and tested to measure their influence on energy consumption using a base case model.Then,the best performed variables were applied to the recreated case study computer models to illustrate the significance of design variables in realisation of low energy office buildings.This demonstrated potential of saving energy and asserted the need to consider low energy strategies for each of these design variables during the early stage in the design process of a building.Also,an energy-design process was proposed to help guide future office building developments in Abuja,Nigeria.