GSAS Energy Assessment workshop demonstrates best practice on improving energy conservation
GORD Academy conducted a workshop on Thursday, 10th May 2018 titled GSAS-D&B Energy Assessment for Basic Schemes, to provide the professionals with a comprehensive understanding of GSAS Energy Assessment Framework and to demonstrate practically how to implement best practices on building energy conservation. The workshop was conducted by Eng. Zaki Ahmed, MEP Team Leader & GSAS Senior Project Manager at GORD, who also examined various GSAS tools and the best practices in calculating the energy performance of buildings through error-free submissions.
The GCC countries are ranked among the highest countries in term of energy consumption per capita in the world and reside on the top of the global table of CO2 emissions per capita. Worldwide, 30 to 40% of all primary energy is used for buildings operation and they are held responsible for 40–50% of greenhouse gas emissions.. One of the main goals of GSAS is to control the building’s depletion of fossil energy over its service life. The Energy category in GSAS consists of factors associated with the energy demand of buildings, the efficiency of energy delivery, and the use of fossil energy sources that result in harmful emissions. To mitigate the impacts of fossil energy, several strategies need to be adopted such as designing the building to lower its energy demand, selecting efficient building systems, lowering the demand on non-renewable sources of energy and minimizing the amount of harmful substances produced by the energy delivery systems and the energy supply network.

This performance-based normative calculation method and energy performance rating approach is not used in other sustainable building rating systems. In most cases, a detailed energy simulation is used as the energy assessment on which a score is based. The normative calculation procedure introduced in GSAS has distinctive advantages of easiness, transparency, robustness, and reproducibility. The normative calculation method based on the CEN-ISO standards is increasingly applied in EU countries for building energy regulation purposes. The workshop was attended by 60 Professionals working on various projects for GSAS certification who expressed their satisfaction with the workshop in general and their desire to attend more future workshops to advance their knowledge in the field.
David Mckenna from Hilson Moran Qatar LLC said,
I attended this workshop to get the latest on Energy Assessment Tools in GSAS, and how they have progressed in the last few years. It will help me get a better understanding of energy assessment of buildings particularly in the Middle Eastern context where for instance, the HVAC systems are very specialized.
Franz Felea Reyes from AEB commented,
I’m excited to learn more about the energy criteria today as it is the major scoring area for our project if we are aiming for a higher GSAS star rating. This workshop will help me give out strategies and suggestions to the design team in my firm on how to achieve a better score by incorporating these sustainability strategies related to energy.
Sherief Abdulraouf Elhadary from Al Sayer Holding Group who had flown in from Kuwait to attend the workshop, thanked GORD for the informative session,
The workshop was very good. I’m new so I got a good overview about GSAS. It is good to see in Kuwait, GCC and all over the world that everyone is taking the direction of sustainability, reducing their carbon footprint, making transport more sustainable, etc. We have already certified our project Toyota City in GSAS Design & Build and it has inspired us to adopt GSAS for our other Al Sayer projects in Kuwait.
Bhupindra Pal Chhabra from QDC also said,
I’m from the first batch of GSAS CGPs so I know the utility of this system very well. Generally, workshops tend to include a lot of topics within a short time which is difficult to retain. But today’s session was very good with specific focus on Energy and hence it generated interest in me. The workshop was very methodically presented. It was interesting throughout and quite useful.
Allan Stirling from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries added,
This training was quite useful because the GSAS tools have developed and matured over the years and giving us practitioners guidance and feedback about these developments will help us implement them.
Ioannis Spanos from KEO also agreed,
Compared to other international sustainability assessment schemes, GSAS is more focused on the operational side which is a positive aspect of the system. This Energy Assessment workshop is very useful because not all professionals working GSAS projects have an MEP background so it’s very good for many of us.

GORD Academy offers multiple learning and networking platforms for industry professionals working in the region. Members of GORD Academy are also connected to each other and the wider community of sustainability professionals through the LinkMe online portal where they can benefit from a host of features to interact and benefit from each other.