TY - JOUR
T1 - The variation of climate change impact on building energy consumption to building type and spatiotemporal scale
AU - Huang, Jianhua
AU - Gurney, Kevin
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank the funding support from National Science Foundation CAREER award 0846358 and the Department of Energy grant #DE-SC0006105 . We would also like to thank Amazon Climate Research Grant Program for providing cloud computing resource.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd.
PY - 2016/9/15
Y1 - 2016/9/15
N2 - Building energy consumption is vulnerable to climate change due to the direct relationship between outside temperature and space cooling/heating. This work quantifies how the relationship between climate change and building energy consumption varies across a range of building types at different spatiotemporal scales based on estimates in 925 U.S. locations. Large increases in building energy consumption are found in the summer (e.g., 39% increase in August for the secondary school building), especially during the daytime (e.g., >100% increase for the warehouse building, 5-6 p.m.), while decreases are found in the winter. At the spatial scale of climate-zones, annual energy consumption changes range from -17% to +21%, while at the local scale, changes range from -20% to +24%. Buildings in the warm-humid (Southeast) climate zones show larger changes than those in other regions. The variation of impact within climate zones can be larger than the variation between climate zones, suggesting a potential bias when estimating climate-zone scale changes with a small number of representative locations. The large variations found in the relationship between climate change and building energy consumption highlight the importance of assessing climate change impacts at local scales, and the need for adaptation/mitigation strategies tailored to different building types.
AB - Building energy consumption is vulnerable to climate change due to the direct relationship between outside temperature and space cooling/heating. This work quantifies how the relationship between climate change and building energy consumption varies across a range of building types at different spatiotemporal scales based on estimates in 925 U.S. locations. Large increases in building energy consumption are found in the summer (e.g., 39% increase in August for the secondary school building), especially during the daytime (e.g., >100% increase for the warehouse building, 5-6 p.m.), while decreases are found in the winter. At the spatial scale of climate-zones, annual energy consumption changes range from -17% to +21%, while at the local scale, changes range from -20% to +24%. Buildings in the warm-humid (Southeast) climate zones show larger changes than those in other regions. The variation of impact within climate zones can be larger than the variation between climate zones, suggesting a potential bias when estimating climate-zone scale changes with a small number of representative locations. The large variations found in the relationship between climate change and building energy consumption highlight the importance of assessing climate change impacts at local scales, and the need for adaptation/mitigation strategies tailored to different building types.
KW - Building energy consumption
KW - Climate change impacts
KW - Energy impacts
KW - Energy policy
KW - Spatiotemporal impacts
KW - Sustainable energy
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U2 - 10.1016/j.energy.2016.05.118
DO - 10.1016/j.energy.2016.05.118
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84971467115
VL - 111
SP - 137
EP - 153
JO - Energy
JF - Energy
SN - 0360-5442
ER -