Earth, Wind and Fire System:Refurbishment of an Office Building in The Netherlands

from BT Bundle 2021

Naturally Tokyo: Found in Translation?

By Shriya Balakrishnan

The built environment is the single largest energy consumer in the EU and one of the largest carbon dioxide emitters. The building sector collectively constitutes for 40% of the energy consumption in which 26% of the energy is consumed by the offices (European Commission, 2020).In the Netherlands, 45% of the office stock is older than 30 years which signifies that the façade and technical installations reach the end of their life (Vijverberg, 2002). Most technical installations have a life span of around 15-20 years and are often more fragile and expensive to maintain (Bronsema, 2013). To improve the overall performance of the buildings, we need to aim at reducing the energy consumption through Energy efficient refurbishments. Existing research has not covered the lack of utilization of renewable energy. The initial objective by the European Commission says that all new buildings in the EU must be nearly zero energy buildings i.e. buildings with very high energy performance and this should be achieved using a significant amount of renewable energy sources. Yet only 7.8% of the energy consumption in the Netherlands use energy generated from renewable sources. Therefore, this research focuses on improving the energy consumption of an office building in the Netherlands by implementing the Earth, Wind and Fire system which utilizes the environmental energy of earth mass, wind and sun to generate and supply energy throughout the building by eliminating the use of HVAC systems. The research adopted basic and dynamic simulation models to evaluate the energy performance of the building with EWF system and ATG method to evaluate the Thermal comfort. The research concluded that the EWF system is an efficient way to reduce the energy performance of the Provinciehuis Utrecht building and by refurbishing the façade and adding PV panels, the energy consumption of the building can reduce further. The research was validated by using the BENG regulations and a proposal was designed to make the Provinciehuis Paris Proof.