Housing Stock Energy Modelling: Evaluating the Impact of Building Standards Towards Net Zero in Muscat

In the context of the challenges resulting from global climate change, urban areas, especially in hot climates such as Oman, are playing a crucial role in mitigating energy consumption and reducing CO2 emissions. This thesis focuses on Muscat, the capital city of Oman, and addresses the critical sustainability issues arising from rapid urbanisation and increasing energy demand. Oman’s ambitious goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 requires a thorough examination of energy consumption in urban housing. This study examines how residents’ daily habits and lifestyles affect energy consumption patterns in Muscat’s residential buildings.
The main objective is to develop a comprehensive framework for assessing building standards to support the implementation of new measures and retrofitting strategies specifically tailored to sustainable energy use in Muscat’s residential buildings. This framework considers future climate scenarios and occupant behaviour. The study employs a hybrid methodology that combines architectural analyses, a housing survey, and EnergyPlus modelling of the housing archetypes representative of the existing housing stock of Muscat. Validated with real housing and energy use data, this city-scale housing stock energy modelling framework was applied to evaluate how proposed changes in the building standards can contribute to the transition of Muscat’s housing sector towards net zero.
The thesis intends to make an original contribution to knowledge by achieving a city-scale housing survey, revealing for the first time the dwelling types and occupancy patterns in Muscat; (ii) the creation of a new geographic information system (GIS) dataset containing 160,000 housing units in Muscat by systematically characterising dwelling types and their ages; (iii) providing a physical and statistical characterisation of Muscat’s housing stock; (iv) developing and demonstrating the Muscat housing stock energy modelling framework to identify influential factors in urban housing energy transition towards Oman’s Net Zero Plan 2050.