Forecasting the carbon footprint of civil buildings under different floor area growth trends and varying energy supply methods

Abstract

The energy consumption and carbon footprint of buildings are significantly impacted by variations in building area and the number of households. Therefore, it is crucial to forecast the growth trend of building area and number of households. A validated time series model is used to predict the new building area in Jilin Province from 2023 to 2030. The new building area in Jilin Province is expected to exhibit two trends of growth in the future: rapid growth (S1) and slow growth (S2). By 2030, under the S1 growth trend, the residential construction area and public building construction area in Jilin Province are expected to be 30.26 Mm2 (million square meters) and 7.23 Mm2, respectively. If the future floor area grows slowly under the S2 trend, the new floor area of different types will be 8.26 Mm2 and 1.33 Mm2 by 2030, respectively. The population growth shows a downward trend. Therefore, the energy consumption and carbon footprint of new buildings with different growth trends of floor areas and the number of households can be predicted. The energy consumption of new buildings shows an increasing trend from 0.32 Mtce in 2023 to 0.55 Mtce in 2030 under the S1 trend and a slight downward trend under the S2 trend. The carbon footprint is expected to be reduced by 0.017–0.311 million tons of CO2 when using heat pumps to supply 10–50% of the heat and wind and solar to supply 10–50% of the electricity. For every 10% increase in the use of ultra-low energy buildings, the energy consumption of civil buildings decreases in the range of 0.0063–0.028 Mtce. If the use of heat pumps and renewable energy increases by 10%, the energy consumption of civil buildings decreases in the range of 0.0054–0.0249 Mtce.