Engineering Archives

Reaping Benefits of Renewable Energy

Sep 21, 2022 | Clean Energy, Energy Transition, MENA, Renewable Energy

FANACK‘s ENVIRONMENT is on how the MENA region falls short of reaping the benefits of renewable energy. Here it is.

MENA Region Falls Short of Reaping Benefits of Renewable Energy

The image above shows solar panels used to generate renewable energy at the Sustainability Pavilion during a media tour at the Dubai Expo 2020. KARIM SAHIB ©AFP

Ali Noureddine

This article has been translated from Arabic.

The main economic challenge caused by the reliance on fossil fuels for energy production is the effect of changing oil derivative prices on the price of electricity production. This is precisely what transpired in 2021, when the average price of a barrel of oil increased by around 68% year over year and fuel consumption soared as economies resumed activity following widespread closures caused by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

The Ukraine conflict’s consequences made the situation even worse this year. The average price of a barrel of oil increased by 50% over the previous year due to shortages in Russian energy supply, despite sustained high global demand for oil as the world struggled to recover from the pandemic’s impacts.

As a result, the price of power produced from fossil fuels rises proportionally to every rise in the value of crude oil, putting additional pressure on consumers as well as raising the cost of production in various economic sectors.

The drawbacks of solely relying on fossil fuels

Fluctuations in the cost of electricity production are not the sole difficulties resulting from a reliance on fossil fuels to generate power. The problems grow more severe for countries importing oil derivatives because the amount of hard currencies needed to import fuel increases in parallel to the rise in oil prices, linking these countries’ financial stability to the price of oil.

As a result, economic growth forecasts and the financial stability of oil-importing countries are often linked to expectations in oil prices. Furthermore, oil markets often witness harsh interactions between oil-producing countries, which have a vested interest in higher prices, and oil-importing countries, which push for measures to rein in oil prices.

These issues only underscore the significance of the fact that, according to figures from the International Renewable Energy Agency, the cost of producing electricity using even the cheapest fossil fuels is still four times higher than producing an equal amount of power through renewable energy. In fact, the same figures indicate that the energy generated using renewable energy over the past resulted in about $55 billion in savings.

Thus, with the cost of producing electricity using solar energy has decreased by 88 per cent between 2010 and 2021, the continued use of fossil fuels to generate power has become a far more expensive practice compared to renewable alternatives.

The importance of renewable energy in the Arab region

Today there are ample reasons to push societies toward producing electricity by using renewable energy as an alternative to fossil fuels, but for the countries of the Arab region the need for this direction is more pressing. With the growth rates of populations in these countries surpassing global growth rates, they witness an inordinately high energy demand.

In addition, many oil-importing Arab countries such as Lebanon, Syria, Sudan and Egypt suffer from severe and long-term monetary crises, which are exacerbated with every rise in global prices of basic goods, including oil, as result of increasing pressure on their balance of payments with the rise in the cost of imports.

The Arab region has a wealth of potential for renewable energy, partly because it has the highest solar brightness, or sunlight exposure, across the globe. The Middle East and North Africa region enjoys the benefits of a solar ray with productivity that ranges between 4 and 8 kilowatt-hours per square meter, according to research by the United Nations Environment Program. It is also distinguished by a low occurrence of clouds, which enables it to use sunlight to produce power for most of the year.

The International Renewable Energy Agency’s statistics, which show that every square kilometer in the MENA region receives solar energy yearly equivalent to the output of 5.1 million barrels of oil, may be used to quantify the significance of this renewable energy.

Therefore, it is obvious that the Arab area can benefit significantly from renewable energy, not only by supplying its own population and economic sectors’ energy demands, but also by exporting power to other parts of the world.

It is important to note that certain Arab nations, like Egypt, already have electrical networks that link them to numerous European and African nations. This serves as a foundation for the infrastructure needed to build systems for power export.

Existing renewable energy projects in the Arab region

Even though their strategic location presents Arab countries with numerous advantages in terms of renewable energy, only four nations, namely Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, have embarked on ambitious projects in this area.

That is not to say that other Arab countries, do not have programs, small projects, and plans in the works for the production of renewable energy, but such projects are small in scope compared to the volume of their electricity needs. As a result, they continue to remain heavily reliant on fossil fuels for power generation.

Egypt is now significantly ahead of other nations in the area in its use of renewable energy as a power source. Mohamed El-Khayat, head of the Renewable Energy Authority, confirmed that his country had raised the contribution of renewable energy to Egypt’s total electricity production to 20 per cent, the highest proportion in the region compared to other Arab countries.

Egypt is also currently striving to raise this ratio to one-third by 2025 through new projects, which include producing 16 percent of Egyptian electricity from wind energy, 7 per cent from solar cells, and 10 percent from hydroelectric energy. The rest of the energy produced from traditional sources will depend on gas extracted from the Egyptian fields, ensuring the country’s energy self-sufficiency.

On the other hand, the UAE’s energy policy is centered on solar energy projects to achieve its objective of using renewable energy to ensure 50 per cent of the country’s power production by 2050 while depending on nuclear energy to secure an additional 25 per cent of overall electricity production. As a result, just 25 per cent of the UAE’s energy demands will be met by fossil fuels, reducing the country’s dependency on them.

As for Saudi Arabia, last year the kingdom saw the highest growth rate among Arab countries in the generation of electricity through renewable sources, increasing its production of renewable energy by 301 per cent over the previous year.

According to Saudi plans, the contribution of renewable energy to the total locally produced electricity is expected to rise to 30 per cent by 2030, alongside plans to develop electricity delivery networks that would later allow it to export the surplus to neighboring countries.

Morocco is the most ambitious among Arab countries in terms of power production. It had already successfully increased the proportion of electricity produced from renewable sources to 37 per cent in 2021 – wind energy (13.4 per cent), solar energy (7.03 percent) and hydroelectric (16.57 per cent) – and Morocco plans to increase that contribution to 52 per cent by 2030.

Much more is needed

The figures show that these four Arab countries are giving great importance to renewable energy, not only for the sake of economic stability but also to reduce the impact of fossil fuels on the environment.

However, the scope of these projects remains modest considering the opportunities available in the Arab region, given that it is mostly limited to only four countries and absent from the vast majority of other Arab nations in the region.

This is due to the fact that most Arab countries have limited available financial resources that can be invested in renewable energy. In addition, even the four countries leading the transition to renewable energy in the Arab region are suffering from delays in implementing some of the projects stipulated in the official plans. They will likely fail to meet their targets in a timely manner.

As things stand now, countries of the Arab region can best make use of their potential in renewable energy by looking into partnerships with the private sector, which can help attract foreign investments to the energy sector and contribute to generating clean energy at competitive rates.

These countries should also develop an intraregional electrical grid to enable those that have already started to invest in renewable energy to export their surplus energy to countries suffering from power shortages.

A viable option would be to establish joint investment funds that would enable countries with surplus capital to invest funds in clean energy projects in other countries, thus benefiting both parties simultaneously.

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Living materials are the future of sustainable building

Sep 20, 2022 | Architecture, Built Environment, Carbon footprint, Construction Industry, Design, Engineering, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, MENA, Waste

A Pennsylvania State University RESEARCH on living materials that are the future of sustainable building has elaborated on this aspect of the building materials and / or their combination as illustrated by the above image of Jose Duarte, professor of architecture, and doctoral student Elena Vazquez adjust panels on a prototype of a dynamic window shading system that Vazquez designed and built. Credit to: Patrick Mansell. All rights reserved. If this goes through, we could safely say that building sites will look a bit different in the future.

Keep buildings cool as it gets hotter

Sep 16, 2022 | Architecture, Built Environment, Climate Change, Construction, Construction Industry, Desertification, Energy Transition, Green Buildings, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, MENA

In most of the MENA and the Gulf region, we reach for the A/C control when entering any living or working space. But as we casually flip a switch, we tend not to consider all those carbon emissions caused by machines.

After years of indulgence and as witnessed by all of the end results, climate change is forcing all to go green by trying to keep buildings cool as it gets hotter. Greening the Global Construction Industry has already engaged in developing new techniques, tools, products and technologies – such as heat pumps, better windows, more vital insulation, energy-efficient appliances, renewable energy and more imaginative design – has enabled emissions to stabilize the past few years.

The above image is of I Love Qatar

Keep buildings cool as it gets hotter by resurrecting traditional architectural techniques – podcast

By Gemma Ware, The Conversation and Daniel Merino, The Conversation

The Conversation Weekly podcast is now back after a short break. Every Thursday, we explore the fascinating discoveries researchers are using to make sense of the world and the big questions they’re still trying to answer.

In this episode we find out how “modern” styles of architecture using concrete and glass have often usurped local building techniques better suited to parts of the world with hotter climates. Now some architects are resurrecting traditional techniques to help keep buildings cool.

From western Europe to China, North Africa and the US, severe heatwaves brought drought, fire and death to the summer of 2022. The heatwaves also raised serious questions about the ability of existing infrastructure to cope with extreme heat, which is projected to become more common due to climate change.

Yet, for thousands of years, people living in parts of the world used to high temperatures have deployed traditional passive cooling techniques in the way they designed their buildings. In Nigeria, for example, people have long used biomimicry to copy the style of local flora and fauna as they design their homes, according to Anthony Ogbuokiri, a senior lecturer in architectural design at Nottingham Trent University in the UK.

But in the 20th century, cities even in very hot climates began following an international template for building design that meant cities around the world, regardless of where they were, often had similar looking skylines. Ogbuokiri calls this “duplitecture”, and says it “ramped up the cooling load” due to an in-built reliance on air conditioners.

Alongside this, there was a massive boom in the use of concrete, particularly after the second world war when the Soviet Union and the US started gifting their cold war allies concrete technology. “It was a competition both to discover who actually mastered concrete and who was better at gathering the materials, the people and the energy to make concrete,” explains Vyta Pivo, assistant professor of architecture at the University of Michigan in the US. But too much concrete can contribute to the phenomenon of urban heat islands, where heat is concentrated in cities. Concrete is also a considerable contributor to global carbon emissions.

Some architects and researchers are working to rehabilitate and improve traditional passive techniques that help keep buildings cool without using energy. Susan Abed Hassan, a professor of architectural engineering at Al-Nahrain University in Baghdad, Iraq, focuses a lot on windcatchers in her work, a type of chimney which funnels air through houses to keep them cooler in hot climates. She’s now looking at how to combining underground water pipes with windcatchers to enhance their cooling effects.

Listen to the full episode to find out about other techniques being used to keep buildings cool without relying on air conditioning.

This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also sign up to The Conversation’s free daily email here. A transcript of this episode is available here.

You can listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed, or find out how else to listen here.

Gemma Ware, Editor and Co-Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation and Daniel Merino, Assistant Science Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

Read the original article.

Role Architectural Prototypes Play in the Global South

Sep 15, 2022 | Architecture, Built Environment, Emerging Markets, Indigenous knowledge, Integration of Nature, MENA, Sustainability

Written by Matthew Maganga

It’s an essential component of the design process, where spatial ideations are translated into built form – the design of the prototype. Architectural projects, throughout history and in contemporary practice, have been prototyped to carry out both technical and aesthetic tests, where further insight is gained into the integrity of the design. It’s the blurred line between the experimental and the practical.

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Antoni Gaudí’s 1:25 and 1:10 scale plaster models of Sagrada Família can be defined as architectural prototypes, and so can the wooden model of Filippo Brunelleschi’s Florence Cathedral dome. But these are investigations conducted on a smaller scale. It can be argued that architectural prototypes are most effective when built out 1:1, from which further architectural interventions based on the prototype have the security of a design attempt that is not a scaled-down version of the finished product.

But the making of these prototypes is a protracted endeavor – necessitating the complex maneuvering of resources, labor, and capital – for a structure that aims to merely lay the foundations for how similar designs should be approached in the future.

When scrutinized from the perspective of the Global South, this dialogue is complicated further – in countries that have been historically over-exploited and are currently under-resourced, are full-scale architectural prototypes wasteful if they don’t immediately function as a working building? Is it right for these prototypes to simply exist as say, explorations of new materials without serving as a structure that will be in constant use from its inception?

In colonial Africa, architectural experimentation was commonplace, from Fry and Drew in West Africa to Guido Ferrazza in Libya. This experimentation included that of French industrial designer and architect Jean Prouvé, who in 1949 developed Maison Tropicales – prefabricated, modular housing prototypes constructed out of aluminum designed to be easily transported, assembled, and disassembled.

The design problem that the Maison Tropicales had to solve was climatic – as France’s African colonies faced a shortage of housing and civic buildings. The prototype was designed for the equatorial climate, including a veranda with an adjustable aluminum sun-screen. Internally, walls were made of a combination of sliding and fixed metal panels – as glass portholes provided protection against UV rays.

But despite this resourceful, ingenious response to the tropical climate, the Maison Tropicale as a prototype failed. It was no less expensive than locally constructed buildings, and the French colonial bureaucrats did not warm to the industrial appearance of the house. The prototype, ultimately, was a colonial project built for French administrators. A prototype built for the colonial class that proved unpopular with them, and that instead of being widely adopted, was resigned to be a traveling object, making frequent appearances in design exhibitions. This prototype of the African Tropics became a design object that to most, was known outside of its intended context.

But contemporary practice in the Global South has offered up more substantial prototypes, where investigations into materials are coupled with substantial usage. Senegalese firm Worofila’s Ecopavillon in Diamniadio, constructed in 2019, is one such example. Commissioned by the Ministry of the Environment of Senegal, it is built with earth and typha – a type of water reed found in the Senegal River. Woven typha panels provide sound insulation, and when mixed with adobe bricks, provide thermal insulation.

As the prototype is part of the Senegalese government’s initiative to build a new city to ease congestion in Dakar, its usage is still in its early stages. The intention, though, is clear. The Ecopavillon will allow the monitoring of how the building’s materials behave, and performance can be assessed. the behavior of materials and to measure the performance of buildings. Furthermore, it can act as a training venue for craftspeople, where local knowledge of energy-efficient materials can be further developed.

The most tangible example of a living prototype in the Global South, however, is arguably found in Bangladesh, in Marina Tabassum Architects’ Khudi Bari. It is a modular mobile housing unit, with an area of 128 square feet. Its light footprint and elevated form mimic the architectural vernacular of the Bengal delta, but more pressingly, it responds to climate change.

In an area with high instances of flash flooding, the raised second level acts as shelter for occupants as they await the receding of the water. In the Chars of Bangladesh – low-lying islands naturally formed by silt from rivers – the spaceframe structure is a crucial response, low cost, durable, and easily assembled and disassembled with minimum labor.

The true success of the Khudi Bari project can only be measured by what happens after the housing modules are built. A pilot project initiated by a non-profit organization affiliated with Marina Tabassum Architects in conjunction with private and governmental donors aims to establish at least 80 to 100 “Khudi Bari” modules in the flood-prone communities of Bangladesh by May 2023.

More crucially, March 2021 saw the first three homes built in collaboration with families, with some adapting their modules, with the vision for the future being that people involved in this pilot project will then become part of the training collective as the modules are initiated in other areas.

Perhaps this is how architectural prototypes built in the Global South should function – as bold, inventive assemblages, that are not only for observation and display, but instead examples of architecture that is dynamic, in use, and living.

Read related Article: Why Bamboo is the Future of Asian Construction

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Evidence of Prehistoric Hunting across Arabian Desert

Sep 12, 2022 | Archeology, Culture, Indigenous knowledge, Integration of Nature, MENA, Smart Technology, University education, World

Oxford archaeologists discover monumental evidence of prehistoric hunting across the Arabian desert.

They have found over 350 Monumental Hunting Structures labelled and since then known as ‘Kites’ In Northern Saudi Arabia And Southern Iraq Using Satellite Imagery.

Evidence of Prehistoric Hunting across Arabian Desert

Distribution of kite structures in the Levant and in northern Arabia. White: previously documented kites. Red: kites recorded by EAMENA.

Archaeologists at the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology have used satellite imagery to identify and map over 350 monumental hunting structures known as ‘kites’ across northern Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq – most of which had never been previously documented.

Led by Dr Michael Fradley, a team of researchers in the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project used a range of open-source satellite imagery to carefully study the region around the eastern Nafud desert, an area little studied in the past. The surprising results, published in the journal The Holocene, have the potential to change our understanding of prehistoric connections and climate change across the Middle East.

Termed kites by early aircraft pilots, these structures consist of low stone walls making up a head enclosure and a number of guiding walls, sometimes kilometres long. They are believed to have been used to guide game such as gazelles into an area where they could be captured or killed. There is evidence that these structures may date back as far as 8,000 BCE in the Neolithic period.

Kites cannot be observed easily from the ground, however the advent of commercial satellite imagery and platforms such as Google Earth have enabled recent discoveries of new distributions. While these structures were already well-known from eastern Jordan and adjoining areas in southern Syria, these latest results take the known distribution over 400km further east across northern Saudi Arabia, with some also identified in southern Iraq for the first time.

Dr Fradley said: ‘The structures we found displayed evidence of complex, careful design. In terms of size, the ‘heads’ of the kites can be over 100 metres wide, but the guiding walls (the ’strings’ of the kite) which we currently think gazelle and other game would follow to the kite heads can be incredibly long. In some of these new examples, the surviving portion of walls run in almost straight lines for over 4 kilometres, often over very varied topography. This shows an incredible level of ability in how these structures were designed and built.’

Evidence suggests considerable resources would have had to be coordinated to build, maintain, and rebuild the kites over generations, combined with hunting and returning butchered remains to settlements or camps for further preservation. The researchers suggest that their exaggerated scale and form may be an expression of status, identity and territoriality. Appearances of the kites in rock art found in Jordan suggests they had an important place within the symbolic and ritual spheres of Neolithic peoples in the region.

From the design of the kite heads to the careful runs of guiding walls over long distances, these structures contrast markedly in scale with any other evidence of architecture from the early Holocene period. The researchers suggest that the builders of these kites dwelt in temporary structures made from organic materials that have left no trace visible on current satellite imagery data.

Desert kite research is a very active field just now – Michael and colleagues explore a significant extension to their distribution pattern, which has major implications for our understanding of the relationship of the kite builders with new mobile pastoralists and the occupation of the region.

Bill Finlayson, Director of EAMENA and Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Oxford

These new sites suggest a previously unknown level of connection right across northern Arabia at the time they were built. They raise exciting questions about who built these structures, who the hunted game were intended to feed, and how the people were able to not only survive, but also invest in these monumental structures.

In the context of this new connectedness, the distribution of the star-shaped kites now provides the first direct evidence of contact through, rather than around, the Nafud desert. This underlines the importance areas that are now desert had under more favourable climatic conditions in enabling the movement of humans and wildlife. It is thought the kites were built during a wetter, greener climatic period known as the Holocene Humid Period (between around 9000 and 4000 BCE).

The largest number of kites were built on the Al Labbah plateau in the Nafud desert, where the absence of later Bronze Age burial monuments suggests that a shift into a drier period meant some of these areas became too marginal to support the communities once using these landscapes, with game species also potentially displaced by climate change.

Whether the patterns of kite construction over space and time represent the movement of ideas or people, or even the direction of that movement, remain questions to be answered.

The project, supported by the Arcadia Fund, is now extending its survey work across these now arid zones to further develop our understanding of these landscapes and the effect of climate change.

The study Following the herds? A new distribution of hunting kites in Southwest Asia is published in The Holocene.

Read University of Oxford News & Events

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Reaping Benefits of Renewable Energy

MENA Region Falls Short of Reaping Benefits of Renewable Energy

The drawbacks of solely relying on fossil fuels

The importance of renewable energy in the Arab region

Existing renewable energy projects in the Arab region

Much more is needed

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Living materials are the future of sustainable building

Designed to Adapt: Living materials are the future of sustainable building

Working together across disciplines, researchers from Penn State and the University of Freiburg are applying materials that adapt, respond to the environment, self-power, and regenerate to meet the challenges of adaptive architecture.

The coming decades present a host of challenges for our built environments: a rising global population combined with increasing urbanization; crumbling infrastructure and dwindling resources to rebuild it; and the growing pressures of a changing climate, to name a few.

A new paradigm: Engineered materials inspired by nature

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Keep buildings cool as it gets hotter

Keep buildings cool as it gets hotter by resurrecting traditional architectural techniques – podcast

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Role Architectural Prototypes Play in the Global South

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Evidence of Prehistoric Hunting across Arabian Desert

Evidence of Prehistoric Hunting across Arabian Desert

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MENA Region Falls Short of Reaping Benefits of Renewable Energy

The drawbacks of solely relying on fossil fuels

The importance of renewable energy in the Arab region

Existing renewable energy projects in the Arab region

Much more is needed

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Working together across disciplines, researchers from Penn State and the University of Freiburg are applying materials that adapt, respond to the environment, self-power, and regenerate to meet the challenges of adaptive architecture.

The coming decades present a host of challenges for our built environments: a rising global population combined with increasing urbanization; crumbling infrastructure and dwindling resources to rebuild it; and the growing pressures of a changing climate, to name a few.

A new paradigm: Engineered materials inspired by nature

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Like this:

Keep buildings cool as it gets hotter by resurrecting traditional architectural techniques – podcast

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Evidence of Prehistoric Hunting across Arabian Desert

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