Abstract
Climate change and anthropogenically-forced shift of weather in the future will impact energy use and resilience of both the built environment and the electric grid. The aim of this analysis is to understand how future climate scenarios will impact electricity and natural gas use of commercial buildings in the United States. This study analyzes this impact for 2030, 2045, and 2100 using Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) scenarios defined in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report 5. The large, gridded simulation of meteorological variables for RCPs 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, and 8.5 are selected and downscaled to make available hourly Future Meteorological Year (FMY) weather files for use and improvement in subsequent studies. High performance computing resources use these FMYs to simulate commercial prototype buildings in every American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) climate zone of the United States (US), and results are scaled to nation-wide energy use using conditioned floor area multipliers. The analysis is conducted without speculating the physical and performance traits of future buildings or the grid characteristics. This analysis quantifies the impact of climate change on source electrical and natural gas usage for commercial buildings in the United States over the next 80 years. If US commercial floorspace remained constant, total energy use by 2100 is predicted between an 1.75% decrease under the greatest emission scenario (8.5) and a 1.76% increase under the lowest emission scenario (2.6). When adjusted for anticipated urban growth by 2100, the predicted range is 65% increase (8.5) and 71% increase (2.6). Under a global temperature rise climate scenario, the warmest US climate zones will see a large increases in electricity use derived from space cooling while the coldest US climate zones will see significant decreases in natural gas use caused by the decrease in heating necessary. While climate change may ultimately require adaptations of the built environment to withstand its effects and because the United States is a country that requires more heating than cooling, from a building energy perspective, climate change (average temperature rise) is a net energy saver for the United States.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 125945 |
| Journal | Energy |
| Volume | 263 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 15 2023 |
Funding
This work was funded by field work proposal CEBT105 under the Department of Energy Building Technologies Office Activity Number BT0305000 . We would like to thank Amir Roth and Madeline Salzman for their support and review of this project. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the US Department of Energy under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under Contract Number DEAC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle LLC under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ). This work was funded by field work proposal CEBT105 under the Department of Energy Building Technologies Office Activity Number BT0305000. We would like to thank Amir Roth and Madeline Salzman for their support and review of this project. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the US Department of Energy under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under Contract Number DEAC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modeling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in Table 2 of this paper) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the U.S. Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals.
Keywords
- Building energy modeling
- Building energy use
- Carbon dioxide emissions
- Climate change
