Climate change and building energy: performance, uncertainties and responses (PURe)

Hamed Yassaghi

doi:10.17918/00000673

Climate change, caused by increased emissions produced by human activities, can make a building deviate from its original design and disrupt building energy operations. Building designs need to account for future climate scenarios and effective adaptation and mitigation measures are needed. However, the future is unknown, and climate models only present a snapshot of what the future climate may look like and have many uncertainties. Building energy operations can also be influenced by users and building thermophysical factors which are dynamic and can change through time. Climate uncertainty adds to this uncertainty and complicates evaluating building energy performance and makes classical deterministic approaches in assessing building energy unreliable. Therefore, there is an urgent need for analytical methods in building design to account for climate change while considering uncertainties. This work investigated a critical gap in our understanding of how to address uncertainties associated with building energy use under competing climate change scenarios over their lifetime. The scientific innovation of this work is the integration of climate change-driven building energy modeling with uncertainty analysis. First, the impact of climate change on building energy use and potential response measures are given. Next, methods to generate future weather files which can be directly incorporated into building energy use are examined. Then, a hybrid method to quantify the share of uncertainties from building factors, users and climate is presented by combining ANOVA and Monte Carlo analysis. Finally, a new method is proposed to propagate climate change uncertainties into building energy use by combining regression analysis and Monte Carlo. It was found that downscaling climate models using weather generators can add to existing uncertainties. Buildings should be designed through a framework of possibilities and vulnerabilities to reflect a range of solutions that best suits the intended design. The uncertainty partitioning method has the potential to show the share of uncertainties from climate, user and building factors for any energy use indicator up to the end century. The method was found to be sensitive to input distributions of uncertainty factors. The uncertainty propagation method can be used to provide valuable insight on interpreting the impact of climate uncertainties on building energy use. It can be used where limited future weather files can be generated and reduces computational needs. Results of this work can be leveraged towards enhancing analytical methods in building designs and simulation tools under climate change and towards overcoming limitations of classical approach.

Climate change and building energy: performance, uncertainties and responses (PURe)

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Climate change and building energy: performance, uncertainties and responses (PURe)

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