Future trends of residential building cooling energy and passive adaptation measures to counteract climate change: The case of Taiwan

Measures for remodeling building envelopes in response to climate change have attracted much attention. To devise adequate countermeasures for existing buildings, it is important to understand how the energy consumption behavior of a building may change in the future. To this end, this study first used the morphing method to produce future hourly weather years for use in building simulations based on the predicted values provided by a GCM. The adaptive comfort model was used to identify the air-conditioning operation status during the hours of occupation of a mixed-mode typical residential building to determine cooling energy use. Annual cooling energy use in the past and in three future time slices, the 2020s, 2050s, and 2080s, were dynamically simulated with EnergyPlus. The simulations revealed increases in cooling energy of 31%, 59%, and 82% in the three time slices. Five passive design strategies for building remodeling are proposed, and their potential for mitigating the increases in cooling energy usage is discussed. The results reveal that although no individual strategy can neutralize the increases in cooling energy usage, a combination of several passive strategies may counteract the effects of climate change on cooling energy usage. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd