Assesing buildings adaptation to climate change

Abstract

This paper presents the thermal and energy analysis of a winery project in the current situation and in 3 tentative scenarios (2020-2050-2080). The winery will be build in the Uco Valley, a cold inter-mountain valley in Province of Mendoza (33° 34´ 57.4 "SL; 69º 02´ 47.8" WL and 1,025 masl) (GD base 18 = 1963 / GD base 20 = 2466). An Energy Plus model of the architectural proposal was made with the current climatic conditions, and in the future according to scenario A2 of the IPCC. Meteorological conditions were adopted using one of the IPCC GCMs. EPW files were generated by Climate Change World Weather File Generator (CCWorldWeatherGen, University of Southampton). According to the initial project, current consumption was estimated at 35.70 kWh/m2 (135,374.40 kWh year), and when the proposed improvements were made to the envelope consumption was halved to 18.28 kWh m2 (69,317.76 kWh year). With these results, future consumption is evaluated in the three mentioned scenarios. The building with improvements turns out to be resilient and adapts to climate change, maintaining the energy consumption of refrigeration throughout its useful life, unlike the initial project in which energy consumption for refrigeration tripled by 2080.