Abstract This paper considers energy conservation practices in Qatar with special emphasis on commercial buildings. Energy conservation approaches are classified into five main areas and an Energy Conservation Matrix (ECM) database for buildings is developed. The ECM maps the energy conservation techniques/technologies to models versus their application domain. Three scenarios (building envelope design, change in customer behavior, and consideration of renewable energy supply) are analyzed to study different alternatives for efficiency improvement. The analysis is done in a case hotel. The analysis shows that, the energy conservation potential of using envelope redesign for the case study is about 7.5% while conservation through behavior change ranges between 2.74% and 15.80%. The conserved energy potential ranges between 10% and 24.12% of the site energy in the combinatorial scenario that integrated envelope design alternatives with customer behavior change. The renewable energy (RE) scenario conserves energy, indirectly, by using green energies generated from renewable sources. The output shows that due to changes as per the three scenarios, total CO 2 emissions of the building are also reduced. The analysis shows that adoption of 30% RE alternative can reduce emissions by about 27% with respect to the reference scenario. It is believed that the scenarios developed in this paper and the results obtained will motivate the designers to consider alternative designs or redesigns in the large scale commercial buildings.