Enhancing school buildings energy efficiency under climate change: A comprehensive analysis of energy, cost, and comfort factors

Abstract

Incorporating future weather predictions into building assessments is essential for enhancing resilience, energy efficiency, cost savings, comfort, and sustainable infrastructure development in response to climate change. This study investigates the interplay between climate change and building performance, primarily focusing on energy usage, cost implications, and occupant comfort. It examines how future weather conditions impact school buildings in different climates, analyzing energy, cost, and comfort aspects. The research underscores the significance of tailored climate adaptation strategies for various regions and emphasizes considering future performance, even for highly energy-efficient buildings. Employing a comprehensive simulation-based approach, the study implements and validates future weather data in a Turkish school building, incorporating envelope improvements and photovoltaic applications to boost energy efficiency. A distinctive feature is the rigorous validation of future weather predictions against current measured data, facilitating a regional-level assessment of climate change effects on building energy consumption. The study's novelty lies in its detailed evaluation of climate change's multifaceted impacts on buildings, innovative future climate data validation, and contribution to a more localized and climate-specific approach to addressing building energy-cost-comfort performance. Findings reveal that in hot climates, there is a potential for nearly doubling primary energy consumption, global costs, and CO2 emissions in the future for both cost-optimal and nearly zero-energy scenarios. Consequently, the savings would decrease from 53-63 % to 13–30 %. In contrast, in cold climates, the impact on these parameters differs slightly, with reduced primary energy consumption and CO2 emissions but higher global costs. Notably, a building retrofitted to a high energy efficiency level may experience a substantial increase in future energy consumption and global costs, approaching the levels of currently inefficient buildings.