The potential of comfort daylighting design on improving the energy efficiency of commercial buildings

This paper explores means for more effectively exploiting daylight in buildings through extending periods of illumination free of glare problems. The key concept is to quantify and examine the impact of selected design parameters, e.g. light shelves, on the admission of daylight within buildings. The University of Calgary’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) office building is used as a base model, whereas innovative techniques are developed and presented in this study. Results show that there is still a potential to improve the daylighting design of the building and hence reducing the electric energy consumption