Impact of rural housing energy performance improvement on the energy balance in the North-West of Algeria

Abstract Forty-two percent (42%) of Algerian primary energy was consumed by the building sector and it is still in expansion, due to mainly on an exceptional growth of population and urbanism. In order to reach the increase demand of housing and to keep the rural areas’ inhabitants in their lands, the Algerian state has launched a huge plan of rural housing construction without taking into account the energy performance level which is too bad. The main objective of this work is to analyze the energy performance of rural housing built in the district of Chlef for the three construction programs, besides study their impact on the overall energy balance in the district of Chlef. There are two ways to improve the energy performance of a typical rural house. First, a passive one through the integration of a set of efficiency measures to reduce the need for heating and air conditioning. The efficiency measures include the adequate orientation of the house, insulation of the envelope house, efficient glazing and increased windows size with the use of shading device in summer. Second, an active one using solar PV to supply the house with electricity. The results show that at the end of the last construction's program, more than 219 GW h of electricity and 26,508 t of butane gas could be saved annually at the energy balance level of the district. The annual cost savings associated to these energy savings was estimated at 1281,933$ for butane gas and at 5110,431$ for electricity.