The Effects of Future Climate Change on Energy Consumption in Residential Buildings in China and Retrofitting Measures to Counteract

At present, China is going through a rapid rate of mass urbanisation, and this poses a number of challenges for the building sector. On one hand, under new directives from the government, new buildings will have stricter energy requirements and existing buildings will also need to lower their rate of energy consumption, on another hand, the lifetime of buildings are now intended to last longer, meaning that building designers will also need to account for effects of future climate change when assessing the performance of building schemes. This paper investigates the effect of future climate change on energy consumption in typical residential buildings in different climate regions of China. These include the “Cold” region in the north, which includes Beijing; the “Hot Summer Mild Winter” region in the south, which includes Guangzhou, and two regions from the “Hot Summer Cold Winter”, one along the coast in the east, which includes cities such as Shanghai and Ningbo; the inland region, which includes cities such as Wuhan and Chengdu. Using data from the climate model, HadCM3, Test Reference Years are generated for the 2020s, 2050s and 2080s, for various IPCC future scenarios for these cities. These are then used to assess the energy performance of typical existing residential buildings, and also the effects of retrofitting them to the standard of the current building codes. It was found that although there are reductions in energy consumption for heating and cooling with retrofitting existing residential buildings to the current standard, the actual effects are small compared with the extra energy consumption that comes as a result of future climate change. This is especially true for Guangzhou, which currently have very little heating load, so there is little benefit of the reduction in heating demand from climate change. The overall effects of retro-fitting in other selected cities depend largely on the specification of current existing buildings. In general, more improvements in building standards in all four regions are required to significantly reduce the effects of future climate change