Warming impact on energy use of HVAC system in buildings of different thermal qualities and in different climates

Abstract

In order to combat climate change, energy use in the building must be further reduced. Heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in residential buildings account for considerable fraction of global energy consumption. The potential contribution the domestic sector can make in reducing energy consumption is recognized worldwide. The driving energy of HVACs depends on the thermal quality of the building envelope (TQBE) and outside temperature. Definitely, building regulations are changing with the time toward reduce the thermal loads of buildings. However, most of the existing residential buildings were built to lower TQBE. For instant, 72% of residential dwellings in the 15-EU were built before 1972. To investigate the impact of warming on driving energy of HVACs of a residential building a computer model was developed. Three climate categories/cities were considered, i.e. Stockholm (cold), Istanbul (mild), and Doha (hot). In each city, two buildings were modeled: one was assumed to be built according to the current local buildings regulations (standard TQBE), while the anther was built to lower TQBE. The simulations were run for present and future (in 2050) outdoor designing conditions. The calculations show that the impact of the warming on annual driving energy of HVACs (reduction or increase) depends very much on the climate category and on the TQBE. Based on the climate and TQBE, the change in annual HVACs energy varies from -7.4% (in cold climate) to 12.7% (in hot climate). In mild climate, it was shown that the warming does not have significant impact on annual HVACs energy. Improving the TQBE can mitigate the impact of the warming.