Urban and future climate - Impact on energy consumption and thermal comfort of buildings

Climate change and the urban heat effect are expected to have a large influence on the energy consumption and thermal comfort of buildings. However, using meteorological data which incorporates effects of climate change and characteristics of cities (e.g. vulnerability to the 'urban heat island' phenomenon) is not currently a standard practice in building simulation (BPS). By default, typical meteorological years based on meteorological data of the past 20 years of nearby meteorological stations are used. These stations are normally located outside the city centres (e.g. at airports). From this follows that neither climate change nor urban effects are taken into account in building performance simulation. This may lead to important discrepancy between simulation results and real energy consumption and/or indoor climate data for buildings in urban areas and under future climate conditions. Within Climate-fit.city, these effects are analysed. In a first step, adapted urban and future climate data (modelled with the UrbClim model by VITO) and standard (non-adapted) climate data were compared by analysing the distribution of hourly mean outside temperature for one year. In a second step, this data were included within the Meteonorm software. This will enable the software to model the urban and climate change effects for any place within the urban areas. In a first edition, this was made for the cities of Bern, Prague, Barcelona, Vienna and Rome. In the future, this data will be included for other urban areas in Europe. In a third step the urbanized TMY data sets generated by Meteonorm were used to simulate energy consumption (heating, cooling) and indoor climate conditions (operative temperature) with models of several typical buildings. The whole year simulation runs were made in series for several urban locations and - as reference scenario - with the standard TMY. The "urban" and "future" results were then compared with the reference scenario. Climate-fit.city is a EU project in the framework of Horizon 2020.