The Challenge of Greening the Existing Residential Buildings in the Egyptian Market Base Case

Abstract

Existing buildings are the massive percentage of the building stock, and therefore, are the key to improving efficiency; buildings account for an enormous share of the climate change crisis, and approximately 40% of the world total energy consumption (McArthur & Jofeh, 2015).
 The Egyptian stock of buildings includes about 12 million buildings. 60% of these buildings are residential. The final electricity consumption of the residential buildings in 2010 was 51370 GWh and increased in 2014 to reach 62441 GWh. Thus the share of total energy consumption was 18.8% in 2010 and increased to reach 21.55% in 2014 ("Technology Roadmap - Energy efficient building envelopes.", 2013). Therefore, the residential sector plays an important role in the mitigation of energy consumption crisis, which is expected to increase.
 The research field and initiatives in Egypt on the green buildings and green buildings retrofits are rare and, if existing, are weakly applied. Unlike in developed countries, there is a large research on building retrofits, e.g., the Residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (R-PACE) program and the weatherization assistance program (WAP) of the department of energy (DOE). Both are examples of the incentives to green building initiatives globally.
 This paper discusses the challenge of greening the existing residential buildings in Egypt by demonstrating an analysis of the motives and the barriers to applying green measures in the Egyptian market.
 The research methodology comprises the analytical-comparative method. In the analytical part; the paper identifies the current situation of the residential sector energy consumption in Egypt, and the benefits of greening existing buildings for tenants, investors, and owners.
 In the comparative part, the current situation of Egypt's Green Market Business Case is compared with the international one, discussing the challenge of greening the residential buildings. The paper summarizes the opportunities to improve the building energy efficiency, incentives, and policies that are developed to address significant financial and technical awareness to building efficiency. These policies will help enable critical market actors to make decisions to promote energy efficiency in existing buildings.

Comparative Analysis of Building Rating Systems and Occupant Rating Systems

“…considers waste, energy, water, materials, etc. ), as well as availability of local building materials [11]. Additionally, feasibility is crucial in assessing the ability to make NZBs common as opposed to being exceptions.…”

Identifying Retrofit Technology to Improve Building Energy Performance: A Review

“…The real challenge of greening the existing buildings is to reach the desired achievement while still respect budgets, in addition to handling occupant resistance to the change. [46] the most common main barriers dedicated from reviewing 16 papers showed in the following table and A schematic overview of the five main types of barriers they defined as following : financial barriers, lake of awareness, lake of information, Institutional and administrative barriers and Technical barriers(complexity of the retrofitting action). The identified barriers can be used to guide how construction stakeholders can be influenced to make improvements in sustainable retrofitting projects.…”