Climate change projections for building energy simulation studies: a CORDEX-based methodological approach to manage uncertainties

Abstract

We propose a comprehensive methodological approach to address uncertainties in buildingenergy simulation (BES) studies within a climate change context. Drawing upon expertisefrom the climate community, our approach aims to improve the reliability of climate-de-pendent BES for sustainable building design studies. The methodology focuses on creatingweather files that accurately retain the climate variability from CORDEX high-frequencyclimate data, and performing multiple BES (conducted with climatologies from variousclimate models and emissions scenarios) while removing the climate models biases. Therobustness of the results is assessed through statistical analysis, and an uncertainty rangeis attributed to future energy demand estimations. This approach is illustrated using a rep-resentative prototype of a social house located in central-eastern Argentina. The evaluationspecifically focuses on assessing the influence of climate change projections on coolingand heating energy demand. We systematically assessed uncertainties related to climatescenarios, seasonality, and building design sensitivity. Our exercise highlight that uncer-tainty levels rise with higher emissions scenarios. Within our case study, the cooling (heat-ing) energy demand exhibits substantial variations, ranging from 27-37 (303-330) MJ/m2in a moderate emissions context to 51-70 (266-326) MJ/m2 in a high emissions scenario.Notably, improvements in building efficiency correlate with reduced uncertainty and, inthe context of higher emissions, the projected energy demand can range between 24-37(201-243) MJ/m2. Finally, a discussion is provided on the added value of the proposedmethodology compared to solely utilizing a single climate projection file in BES, whenuncertainties within climate projections remain unassessed.