Climate Change and Residential Energy Use in Europe : Assessing Future Energy Demands and Renewable Generation Potentials

Sammanfattning: In recent years, climate change and the corresponding expected extreme weather conditions have been widelyrecognized as potential problems. The construction industry is taking various actions to achieve sustainabledevelopment, implement energy conservation strategies, and provide climate change mitigation. In addition tomitigation, it is crucial to adapt to climate change, and to investigate the possible risks and limitations of mitigationstrategies. Although the importance of climate change adaptation is well-understood, there are still challenges inunderstanding and modeling the impacts of climate change, and the consequent risks and extremes.This licentiate dissertation aims to assess the impact of climate change on the building energy performance andindoor thermal comfort in 38 major European cities distributed in five difference climate zones. In addition, this studyalso investigates the potential of renewable energy generation considering solar PV and wind energy generations.To do this, an ensemble of multiple future climate scenarios with high temporal and spatial resolutions have beenused in this work, enabling us to account for climate variations and extreme events. A set of future climate big datagenerated by RCA4 regional climate model (RCM) were used. In total, 13 future climate scenarios covering fiveglobal climate models (GCMs) and three representative concentration pathways (RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5)were used for the 90-year span of 2010-2099, divided into three 30-year periods (2010-2039, 2039-2069 and 2069-2099).Results show that extreme long and short-term climate events can cause significant changes in energy demand,particularly peak loads during extreme events. This work provided more insights into the importance of consideringboth long- and short-term variations of climate, including extreme events, when assessing future energy solutionsand the energy performances of building stocks.The availability of fine temporal and spatial resolution climate datais crucial for assessing the plausible energy demands of buildings; however, it is important consider climateuncertainties, multiple scenarios, and extreme climate events.Finally, the database of results for each city andclimate zone allows decision makers and designers to count for future climate uncertainties in the early stages ofbuilding design.