improving the passive building energy efficiency through numerical simulation–a case study for tetouan climate in northern of morocco

Nowadays the construction in Morocco is poorly adapted to the climatic conditions of the country. This contributes to the increase of electricity demand by 7% annually. The Department of Energy is interested in introducing sustainable construction for large construction programs in Morocco. Especially as there is a large demand for new buildings and then the general goal is to build them energetically more efficient than in today's practice. To reach the said goal, energy demand of the building shall be minimized without trading off the environmental comfort for living. In this study, an existing prototype office building in the city of Tetouan in northern of Morocco is modelled and analyzed. This paper illustrate the procedure and the simulations results, discusses the major overall results and highlights the effect of the building refurbishment steps and how much energy could be saved in comparison with the actual Thermal Building Regulation in Morocco. The regulation sets the maximum annual heating requirements for heating and cooling in the administrative buildings in 49 kWh / m2 / year in the north zone of Morocco, which allows a gain in the energy bill of 34 DH*/ m2 / year. The dynamic building simulations are done to determine the thermal performance of the building by TRNSYS simulations in order to conduct analysis on the influence of building shell parameters to the heating and cooling demands, thus, the improvement of the passive building energy efficiency. * Moroccan Dirham, MAD = 0,10 US-$ (January 31, 2017)