Studying the importance of two uncertainty factors of the future climate in energy simulation of the Swedish building stocks

Paper in proceeding, 2012

Making a sustainable built environment needs knowing about the probable future climate conditions. There are different climate models which are simulating the future climate conditions numerically and their results are applicable in building simulations. The simulated climate data contains different uncertainties which can affect the building simulation results considerably. For having a reasonable assessment of the future performance of buildings it is necessary to consider the important uncertainty factors and do not make conclusions about the building performance based on one climate data. In this paper, results of the energy simulation of building stocks in three cities of Sweden are presented. Effects of two uncertainty factors of the climate data on heating demand of the building stocks are assessed by looking into probability distribution of the annual heating demand. The two uncertainty factors of the climate data are having different global climate models and different emissions scenarios. Results show that selection of the global climate model can change the heating demand prediction of a building stock up to 20%. This value lowers down to 10% in the case of having different emissions scenarios. According to the results differences between scenarios vary by changing the location, but the variations are small which means that location is not the dominant factor comparing to the climate scenario.