Future climate resilience through informed decision making in retrofitting projects
Paper in proceeding, 2020

High energy use for space conditioning in residential buildings is a significant economic factor for owners and tenants, but also contributes to resource depletion and carbon emissions due to energy generation. Many existing dwellings should thus be retrofitted in order to fulfil the ambitious EU carbon emission mitigation goals by 2050. To investigate how future climate resilience can be implemented in the design process of retrofitting measures, this study concentrates on real case studies that have been retrofitted during the past decade. The performance of retrofitting measures for four case studies in Denmark and Germany were investigated under future climate projections and compared between the non-retrofitted initial stage of the buildings and the retrofitted stage. Building performance simulations were employed to investigate how severe the effects of climate change until the end of the 21st century on the material choice and system design is. Results show that summertime thermal comfort will be a major challenge in the future. Energy use for space heating was seen to decrease for periods in the future, also the severity of cold events decreased, resulting in a decline of heating peak loads. Additionally, not considering extreme events was proven to lead to miss-dimensioning thermal systems. Overall, the study shows that adaptation of informed decisions, accounting for the uncertainties of future climate, can bring a significant benefit for energy-efficient retrofits, potentially promoting adequate passive measures as well as free cooling to prevent overheating and enhance heat removal.

Future climate

Building Performance Simulation

Resilience

Retrofitting buildings

Climate change

Residential buildings

Building stock

Climate action

Author

Jonas Manuel Gremmelspacher

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture

Lunds tekniska högskola

Julija Sivolova

Lunds tekniska högskola

Emanuele Naboni

University of Parma

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture

Vahid Nik

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Building Technology

Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

Lunds tekniska högskola

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

03029743 (ISSN) 16113349 (eISSN)

Vol. 12251 LNCS 352-364
9783030588076 (ISBN)

20th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2020
Cagliari, Italy,

Subject Categories

Other Environmental Engineering

Energy Systems

Building Technologies

DOI

10.1007/978-3-030-58808-3_26

More information

Latest update

10/29/2020