ZEMCH 2015 - International Conference Proceedings

4. Literature Review Extensive research have been tackled the retrofit benefits, as well as the accompanied barriers and challenges that may appear technically, financially or socially, in order to overcome them and reveal the maximum potential of the retrofit process. Millerand and Buys (2008) investigated the social dimensions of these barriers by focusing on the tenants of commercial office buildings. A case study building in Melbourne, Australia with undergoing retrofit has been chosen for this study. A small sample size was used for interviews with semi-structured in-depth questions. The result revealed that tenants of commercial buildings are interested in sustainability initiatives; however, they have limited understanding of the energy efficiency performance potentials. As a result, benefits, cost and the process needed to be clearer. Olgaya and Setruto (2010) presented creative tools that provoke wise decision making by involving the key players and the needed skills. They reviewed some of the barriers such as dealing with the buildings’ systems individually, considering the initial cost and the payback period more than considering the analysis of the life cycle cost, and the split incentive issue. Eventually they discussed and suggested some options for stakeholders to overcome these barriers. On the other hand, Chidiac (2010) explained that the effectiveness of any energy retrofit measure relies on many building-related factors such as location, operation, size, building envelope and the HVAC system. He found out that the energy consumption reduction, because of implementing different measures, is not the sum of their individual impact. The interactive effects between these measures play an important role in increasing their efficiency. A simulation of all combined energy saving measures must be included in order to obtain the complete picture of the energy consumption. Regarding the environmental and economical impact of retrofitting some big commercial buildings, some successful examples are presented such as the Empire State building (Fluchrer et al. 2010) and the Italian headquarters of a major insurance company in Italy (Aste and Pero 2013). The Rockefeller report 2012 has shown that in the US alone and, by taking into consideration all the market segments in the existing buildings, more than $279 billion could be devoted in retrofitting these existing buildings. This will bring about over $1 trillion over 10 years of energy saving. This amount of saving is equivalent to 30% of the annual electricity spend. Moreover, if these retrofits were taken seriously and applied successfully, they could create around 3.3 million cumulative job years of employment with a broad range of experiences. At the end, if the retrofit approach was successfully implemented, the US emissions would be reduced by about 10% (The Rockefeller Foundation 2012). Moreover, in the UAE, a couple of papers presented different scenarios of upgrading the energy efficiency of selected existing case studies in Abu Dhabi that had been built during different decades. The energy consumption for the upgraded scenarios were evaluated and compared to the energy consumption of the as-built case. One paper went beyond presenting the energy saving and evaluated the economic impact of implementing such energy saving measures (AlAwadhi 2013; Manneh 2014). 4.1 The Barriers Retrofitting existing buildings has a lot of uncertainties, for instance, the changes in climate, human behavior, services, and government policies all of which have effect on the applied solutions and hence the success of any retrofit project. The building system’s interaction adds to the complexity of this task (Staford et al. 2011). The large amount of unexploited potentials to the energy Retrofitting existing buildings in UAE: barriers, opportunities, and recommendation 657

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