Future climate change on energy consumption of office buildings in different climate zones of china

Abstract

We quantitatively evaluated the future energy consumption of office buildings for cooling and heating in Harbin, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, which represented different building climate zones in China. The results show that office buildings in different building climate zones have a decreasing trend of heating load and an increasing trend of cooling load. For the change of heating load, the fastest decreasing rate is in Harbin, located in a severe cold zone with 32.9 and 81.5 W/m2 per 10 years for low and medium forcing, respectively, followed by Shanghai, located in a hot summer and cold winter zone, and Tianjin, located in the cold zone. For the change of cooling load, the fastest increasing rate is in Shanghai, with 76.3 and 124.0 W/m2 per 10 years for low and medium forcing, respectively, followed by Guangzhou, located in a hot summer and warm winter zone. By contrast, the increasing rate for the cooling load is relatively slow in Harbin and Tianjin. By comparing with the past 50 years (1961-2010), total energy consumption in Harbin will decrease in the future during two periods (2011-50 and 2011-2100), with 1.93% and 1.85% reduction in 2011-50 for low and medium forcing, and 2.16% and 2.72% reduction in 2011-2100, respectively.