The Evaluation of High-Rise Buildings in Terms of Solar Energy Use

In recent years, modern societies have not been able to live without energy. So, energy is becoming more and more serious and environmental protection is one of the most important problems in countries' sustainable development. Different types of energies such as thermal, electricity and so on are used in people daily lives. Many of these energy types derived from sedimentary sources like crude oil and coal, which are not interminable. In this case, one of the fundamental challenges of today's world is seeking renewable energy alternatives to be replaced for the fossil fuels, especially for the energy supply of high-rise buildings, which with their vast facades have a great potential for consuming sustainable energies. Thus, the emphasis has been put on the practices and attempts have been done to take advantage of solar radiation as an energy source. Accordingly, as the planet is suffering from global warming and interminable supplies of energy, finding some methods and principals to diminish energy is truly consequential. For this purpose, surveying and analyzing all aspects of a building's energy use in order to find practical ways to decrease consumption is needed. Hence, the price of fossil fuels cannot compete with sustainable resource costs. The financial and investment costs of renewable energies are still high. So, in order to clarify and study the essential role of the solar radiations in saving energy, due to research limitation three types of high-rise building from use of solar energy in the temperate climate zone are compared. Although there are many appreciable scientific works to solve energy efficiency problems, there are still huge gaps, especially negligence in analyzing the effectiveness of different active technology and passive strategy criterias, found in high-rise buildings as an imminent part of a new society. Meanwhile, the author's main attempt is to make viewpoints of some architects more clear about the influences of benefiting from solar energy on high-rise buildings and compare the reliability of these attitudes in the case studies, in order to obtain an environmental friendly pattern of high-rise buildings. Thereby, this study is based on a theoretical approach supported mainly by the outcomes of literature review and case study analysis from the solar design aspects. On the other hand, it is a combination of two main phases; qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection. Finally, as skyscrapers are indispensable in modern cities such as Tehran, Frankfurt and London. Thus, they consume a great deal of energy, considering new ways of benefiting renewable energies can have a vital role in reducing building energy consumption. Furthermore, the results of this research show that sustainable skyscrapers, which are benefited from solar energy design, can be more energy efficient related to use different solar passive strategies - direct solar gain, indirect solar gain, isolated solar gain, thermal storage mass and passive cooling systems - and active technologies. Key Words: High-Rise Buildings –Renewable Energy Sources –Passive Solar Strategies – Active Solar Technology.