Energy Efficiency in the Brazilian Built Environment - Retrofitting strategies for a hotel in Goiânia

This work aims at supplying its readers with a current panorama about energetic issue in the Brazilian built environment. Sustainable development concept and natural resources’ rational consumption sum up an outstanding subject in the recent years, matter for directives and guidelines concerning energy in most various aspects of the contemporary society. In Brazil instead this process has been started by a strong crisis on energy mains power system in 2001, and only now first actions target on fostering energetic efficiency in buildings are getting solid.
Nevertheless there is a perceptible resistance from Brazilian architectural practice against technological development and, between a quite commercial architecture and a purist production which reproduces a past of dubious quality, there is a lack of space for an architecture coherent with current deals. It is indispensable that building practice in Brazil, even the one known as bioclimatic, start being studied in a more scientific approach concerning energy, to finally get understood in a qualitative way within built environment.
In this sense a hotel in Goiânia, a capital of one Brazilian state, was analyzed through energetic simulations on its status quo. By a sensitive analysis it was possible to identify building’s criticalities concerning energy consumption and, by proposing several scenarios target to energy savings and efficiency promotion, new simulations were run and results were analyzed. In this way it was possible to create an analytical reference about the quantitative impact of various retrofitting strategies on a Brazilian hotel building’s global consumption.