Analysis of Regenerative, High-Performance and Cultural-Based Single-Family Homes: Impacts of a New Generation of Affordable Housing in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Housing represents a substantial financial challenge for many home-seekers in Saudi Arabia (KSA), especially among young adults. Most private, single-family homes available in the real estate market have significant square footage and also come with large land areas, and often they are completely devoid of the architectural identity of the region. Furthermore, such homes require large amounts of energy due to their large size, do not integrate passive thermal elements, and rarely integrate efficient active control systems. Several attempts have been made to explore the benefits of vernacular or local architectural elements from heritage architecture, some others have been concentrated on accessing affordable housing through leveraging cost-cutting construction techniques, building envelopes, and employing lower-cost building materials. Unfortunately, appropriate numerical experiment and comprehensive simulations are lacking in these investigations surrounding the integration of such elements into modern house designs. Additionally, it has been recognized by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy ACEEE) that the residential sector can play a significant role in decarbonization, i.e., the minimization of carbon emissions through energy efficiency, electrification, distributed electricity generation, and the use/generation of electricity from carbon-free fuels.

The principal objective of this research is to investigate a new generation of affordable housing that can support clean energy transformation by establishing new regenerative design that promote sustainability and cultural identity while offering a healthy living standard. This study is based on the City of Jeddah, KSA climate conditions, includes the integration of vernacular architectural elements; such as rowshans and windcatchers, renewable technologies, emergent efficient active control systems and life cycle analysis. The analysis of weather conditions revealed that Jeddah has the potential for natural ventilation 34% of the time annually, from November to March. Additionally, the findings surrounding the integration of local architectural elements into modern design through detailed CFD analysis showed that appropriate design configurations for rowshan and windcatcher provide ventilation to create an effective range of thermal comfort reducing the use of air conditioning in hot-dry climates.

This study also included emergent cooling and renewable systems, such as variable refrigerant flow (VRF) systems and solar photovoltaics (PV) systems as technologies that could be integrated for regenerative design approaches. The VRF system can reduce up to 28% of the annual house electricity consumption than mini-split system, which reduced the EUI from 123 kWh/m2/yr (39 kBtu/ft2/yr) to 88 kWh/m2/yr (28 kBtu/ft2/yr) . Use of solar PV systems can reduce the EUI for households to zero or moving beyond the sustainable design concept and shifting to regenerative design, which produce positive results in healing the surrounding environment. The contribution of this research support the determination of create a new baseline for a regenerative single-family home design in Jeddah, KSA. Additionally, this research provides a step forward to developing passive and active hybrid design alternatives to realize a new generation of affordable housing necessary to deal with environmental problems in the coming decades under Saudi Vision 2030 requirements.