In March 2024, SIFS completed an office building in Jebel Ali Industrial first. The building was originally designed with typical green building regulations for building envelope. The client approached SIFS with the intent of reducing the operational energy for the building & seeing the possibility of building a net-zero-energy building.
Since HVAC is the largest energy consumption source for an office building in the Middle East, SIFS proposed reducing U-values for the building envelope, complemented with other active energy savings measures (optimized air conditioning design & lighting controls). The client’s Initial design (insulation values of 0.57 W/m2K for the wall and 0.3 W/m2K for the roof) was upgraded to SIFS building envelope systems, and the design calculations showed that the required 26 tons of air conditioning had been reduced to 16 tons i.e. a 38% reduction to cooling design due to the building envelope upgrade.
The building was commissioned on March 1st, 2024 & the client had set up a real-time monitoring system (a typical BMS system) in the office which helped monitor and evaluate the energy consumption of the building.
To ensure net zero energy building, a 33 kW PV system was installed on the available roof space and was commissioned on June 21st, 2024.
A financial analysis comparing the client's original design with the upgraded SIFS design demonstrated that prioritizing passive energy-saving strategies resulted in a lower overall cost for constructing a net-zero-energy building.