Impacts of climate change and its uncertainties on the renewable energy generation and energy demand in urban areas

Paper in proceeding, 2019

This work investigates the effects of future climate uncertainties in calculating the heating and cooling demand of buildings and estimating potentials for renewable energy generation (solar PV and wind). The building stock of Lund in Sweden is considered for energy simulations and for future climate, the most recent outputs of RCA4, which is the 4th generation of the Rossby Centre regional climate model (RCM), is used considering several two representative concentration pathways (RCPs) and four global climate models (GCMs). Simulations and assessment are performed for three 30-year time periods, from 2010 until 2099. Through comparing distributions of data sets, it is found that the uncertainty induced by climate models affects the estimation of renewable energy generation more than those induced by time periods. Changes in the heating demand due to climate change and uncertainties are surprisingly low while it is very large for cooling demand. This can be because of having a good quality for buildings on the average, however this should be more investigated for other cities in Sweden.