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Impact of Climate Change on Buildings
Abstract
Significant scientific work to evaluate the potential climatic changes due to human activities causing greenhouse gas release continues to expand our understanding of this complex issue. One portion of this research is the analysis of the impact of buildings on climate. Currently, the most widely accepted climate change scenarios predict increases of between 1 and 3.5°C for the global annual average temperatures. Yet little research (if any) has pursued the impact of climate change on buildings—energy use, peak demand, costs, equipment life, and comfort/discomfort. Will climate change cause significant increases in energy use and peak demand—along with cost shocks? Will demands on building heating and cooling equipment decrease life? What are the potential impacts on comfort? This paper will present the results of work to characterize the potential impact of climate change on a small office building test case. Using detailed temperature change predictions from the major climate change scenarios, existing typical weather data are modified. These modified data are then used in multi-scenario, multi-year building energy and environmental performance simulations. Summary results from the simulation work are presented.
... Energy consumption and indoor air temperature differ from a climatic region to another; the increase in the outdoor dry bulb temperature causes increase in the indoor air temperature and in energy consumption especially under future climate change scenarios [3]. Among the complexities that prevented, applying, assessing and connecting environmental and climatic knowledge to practice [4], coupled simulation techniques offer a potential platform to assess the correlation between outdoor-indoor environments [5]. ...
... In this work, two different prototypes (A9 & B6) within a new sub-urban development project in Borg El-Arab city were simulated to study the effect of Urban Canopy Green Coverage in improving the outdoor micro-climate and in reducing energy consumption in the residential buildings while maintaining indoor thermal comfort within different future climate change scenarios. As generally noted, the values of energy consumption and indoor air temperatures differ from a climatic period to another, as the outdoor dry bulb temperatures generally increases due to the temperature increase under climate change [3]. The simulation results were presented in the following graphs (Figs. ...
... While Fig. 7, showed the monthly energy consumption per flat (kWh) for both prototypes under the different climate change scenarios. As predictable, the energy consumption increases as it directly proportional to the temperature increase under future climate change [3]. ...
The trend of urban and suburban developments is concluding that more than 70% of the world population will be living in urban areas by mid-21st century within dis-comfortable built environment. In Egypt, a concern about climate change resilient communities is having more listeners after Paris climate agreement in 2015. Therefore, assessing present and future outdoor microclimatic effects on the indoor environmental quality and energy consumption in turn is crucial to build the capacities for mitigation and adaptation strategies. In this research work, the coupled outdoor–indoor simulation methodology is applied using ENVI-met and DesignBuilder to let buildings respond to the street canyon conditions since indoor simulation packages does not consider urban details. Such mutual relation is explored in a site case in Borg El-Arab, Alexandria, Egypt, in which urban canopy green coverage (trees, green walls and roofs) have been applied. Comparing results of indoor thermal comfort for the examined site buildings in present until end of century (2020, 2050 and 2080) with and without the urban canopy green coverage; show that indicators and adaptation strategies can be developed for climate change scenarios. Keywords: Coupled simulations, Environmental performance, Canopy green coverage, Climate change
... The building simulation and environmental performance software packages have been in use (and under constant development) for many decades and have the ability to evaluate a wide range of responses to the external stimuli [30]. The integrated modelling is defined as the best practice approach to building design as it allows the designers, architects, and engineers to link energy, the environment, and health by assessing the building's design, such as overheating analysis, assessment of internal conditions of the building (infiltration, ventilation, lightning gain, occupancy sensible and latent, equipment sensible and latent, and pollution generation), evaluation and enhancement of the building's thermal mass and evaluating alternate technologies (energy efficiency and renewable energy), and regulatory compliance and performance views [31,32]. ...
Citation: Hasan, A.; Bahadori-Jahromi, A.; Mylona, A.; Ferri, M.; Tahayori, H. Investigating the Potential Impact of Future Climate Change on UK Supermarket Building Performance. Sustainability 2021, 13, 33. https://dx.
... For each climatic period: (1) the upper left graph represents the monthly energy consumption for the three different sets of building materials (OS, SO and SS). As expected, the energy consumption increases when moving from a climatic period to the following one, as a result of the temperature increase under climate change [43] in all of the climatic zones. ...
... Similarly, a house insulation can also be particularly useful, when due to climate change extreme cold and extreme hot spells are increasingly becoming a more common phenomenon. Annual temperature is expected to increase from 1 to 3.5°C in the forthcoming decades, and also due to concentration of industrial infrastructure, buildings and transportation often urban heat islands are formed (Hulme et al. 2002;Crawley 2003Crawley , 2008. Thus, insulation can help to maintain human comfortability temperature in the house in both extremes without having to use much energy either in space heating or air conditioning/cooling. ...
The sustainable development philosophy can be regarded as the most multi- and interdisciplinary field. On the other hand, climate change, which is relatively a new field, has yet been evolving as another significantly multi- and interdisciplinary field. Both, the sustainable development and climate change have many factors in common ranging from socio-economic to the environment. However, commonality between the two has so far been studied insufficiently. This paper is to advance knowledge in this direction, specifically considering the Climate Change Act 2008 of the UK that legally binds the country to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). By employing the UK housing sector as a case study, it is demonstrated via numerical calculations that even partly insulating the existing UK housing stock, legal targets of the Act can almost be met for that sector. Links are also drawn between climate change and sustainable development and that how addressing climate change can directly and indirectly help meeting the national sustainability agenda.
... For each weather period, the upper left graph represents the monthly energy consumption for the different shading ratio's alternatives of the solid parts of the building envelope. As expected for the same climatic region, the energy consumption increases from a climatic period to the following period due to the temperature increase under climate change (Crawley 2007), this applies to all climatic zones. The upper right graph in each weather period represents the annual energy cost according to the household electricity tariffs used in Egypt (MOEE 2012). ...
... C) (see for example Ref. [4] and the survey of approaches in Ref. [20]) instead of the true building balance point or simulation approach (see however, Refs. [2,6,15,19,20,41]). Energy consumption is generally correlated with changes in HDD or CDD in the same periodicity (i.e., monthly or annual). ...
This paper presents the results of numerous commercial and residential building simulations, with the purpose of examining the impact of climate change on peak and annual building energy consumption over the portion of the EIC (Eastern Interconnection) located in the United States. The climate change scenario considered includes changes in mean climate characteristics as well as changes in the frequency and duration of intense weather events. Simulations were performed using the BEND (Building ENergy Demand) model which is a detailed building analysis platform utilizing EnergyPlus™ as the simulation engine. Over 26,000 building configurations of different types, sizes, vintages, and characteristics representing the population of buildings within the EIC, are modeled across the three EIC time zones using the future climate from 100 target region locations, resulting in nearly 180,000 spatially relevant simulated demand profiles for three years selected to be representative of the general climate trend over the century. This approach provides a heretofore unprecedented level of specificity across multiple spectrums including spatial, temporal, and building characteristics. This capability enables the ability to perform detailed hourly impact studies of building adaptation and mitigation strategies on energy use and electricity peak demand within the context of the entire grid and economy.
... Building energy modelling and simulation programs had been used to evaluate building performances and assessments in the areas of building design and regulatory compliance, evaluation of changing weather data for an overheating analysis, assessment of building internal conditions (infiltration, ventilation, lightning gain, occupancy sensible and latent, equipment sensible and latent, and pollution generation), evaluation and enhancement of building thermal mass, evaluation and selection of renewable energy sources, building automation systems and moisture phenomena. Moreover, modelling and simulation of buildings of selected building range could be extended to represent the entire building stock (Crawley 2003). ...
Global demand for dwelling energy and implications of changing climatic conditions on buildings confront the built environment to build sustainable dwellings. This study investigates the variability of future climatic conditions on newly built detached dwellings in the UK. Series of energy modelling and simulations are performed on ten detached houses to evaluate and predict the impact of varying future climatic patterns on five building performance indicators. The study identifies and quantifies a consistent declining trend of building performance which is in consonance with current scientific knowledge of annual temperature change prediction in relations to long term climatic variation. The average percentage decrease for the annual energy consumption was predicted to be 2.80, 6.60 and 10.56 for 2020s, 2050s and 2080s time lines respectively. A similar declining trend in the case of annual natural gas consumption was 4.24, 9.98 and 16.1, and that for building emission rate and heating demand were 2.27, 5.49 and 8.72 and 7.82, 18.43 and 29.46 respectively. The study further analyse future heating and cooling demands of the three warmest months of the year and ascertain future variance in relative humidity and indoor temperature which might necessitate the use of room cooling systems to provide thermal comfort.
ABSTRACT
A sustainable design guide has a huge potential to enhance the sustainability of the built environment. This thesis investigates the potentials of a sustainable residential design guide and develops a framework for its actualization in the three climatic regions in Nigeria. These regions are; Highland Climate Region (HCR), Tropical Savannah (TSC) and the Tropical Rainforest Climate Region (TRC). Given that Nigeria is the seventh most populous country in the world, and most populous in Africa, makes any statistical findings from Nigeria relevant to the rest of the world. This sub-Saharan country is also faced with a huge yearly housing shortage of over ten million units and yet little is known on the efforts and actions taken by Nigeria to ensure that expected new buildings are sustainably designed in line with the global concerns. A concurrent embedded strategy was used in the investigation processes which provided both primary and secondary data sources for this research. Tools for the investigation were; literature review, pilot study, questionnaires and interviews. A Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient value of 0.96 was achieved from the survey instrument used. The questionnaire had 283 participants and a total of 30 interviewees were interviewed. The quantitative data from the questionnaire survey were analysed using SPSS 20 software and the NVivo 10 software was used for the qualitative analysis. Findings suggested that the impacts of climate change are evident and significant across all three regions.However, temperature increase recorded a significant value of more than 0.000 significance (p) level at 0.88 across the three regions, an indication that temperature increase is common to all three climatic regions. On the other hand, flooding, desertification/drought and erosion are more prevalent in the HCR, TSC and TRC respectively. This research’s contributions to knowledge includes; identifying the climatic design parameters for each region and the development of a conceptual framework. Hence, this research is a pioneer study in the subject of climate change and buildings in Nigeria. The thesis concludes that, the framework would promote the production of sustainable residential buildings in Nigeria. Also, areas of future research were suggested to include; the use of New technologies, effective collaborations, policy formulation and testing of the framework.
Keywords: climate change, design guide,framework,sustainability, Nigeria.
A recent study by the New Buildings Institute looked at the energy performance of 121 LEED certified commercial buildings and concluded they were saving 25-30% energy relative to conventional buildings. Here we identify several critical flaws in the NBI analysis and, upon re-examination of the data, reach different conclusions. We find that the average energy consumption by LEED certified buildings is actually higher than the corresponding average for the US commercial building stock. This difference is shown to be largely due to the over-representation of "high-energy" principle building activities (PBA's) such as laboratories and the under-representation of "low-energy" PBA's such as non-refrigerated warehouses in the LEED building data set, relative to their occurrence in the U.S. commercial building stock. Eliminating high-and low-energy PBA's from both data sets yields "medium-energy" building subsets free of these disparities. Comparing these we find that LEED medium energy buildings, on average, use 10% less site energy but no less source (or primary energy) than do comparable conventional buildings. LEED office buildings achieve 17% reduction in site energy, but again, no significant reduction in primary energy use relative to non-LEED office buildings. We further find that these results do not change significantly if LEED buildings are compared with newer vintage, non-LEED buildings. As green house gas (GHG) emission correlates with primary energy, not site energy, we conclude that LEED certification is not yielding any significant reduction in GHG emission by commercial buildings.
A new building energy simulation program, known as EnergyPlus, was first released in April 2001. EnergyPlus builds on the capabilities and features of BLAST and DOE-2 and includes many simulation features such as variable time steps, configurable modular systems that are integrated with a heat balance-based zone simulation and input and output data structures tailored to facilitate third party module and interface development—features that have not been available together in a mainstream building energy simulation program. Other simulation capabilities include three thermal comfort models, extensive daylighting and advanced fenestration capabilities, multizone airflow modeling, more robust HVAC equipment models, more flexible system modeling, and photovoltaic simulation. Currently, more than ten private sector companies have stated their intentions to create user interfaces for EnergyPlus. In the first year after the release of EnergyPlus, more than 7,000 people—from more than 90 countries—downloaded and registered EnergyPlus.
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