Abstract
This paper presents an analysis to foresee renewable design requirement changes of net- zero carbon buildings (NZCBs) under different scenarios of potential future climate scenarios in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest regions. A climate change model is developed in this study using the Gaussian random distribution method with monthly temperature changes over the whole Northeast and Midwest regions, which are predicted based on a high greenhouse gas (GHG) emission scenario (i.e., the representative concentration pathways (RCP) 8.5). To reflect the adoption of NZCBs potential in future, this study also considers two representative future climate scenarios in the 2050s and 2080s of climate change years in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest regions. An office prototype building model integrates with an on-site photovoltaics (PV) power generation system to evaluate NZCB performance under the climate change scenarios with an assumption of a net-metering electricity purchase agreement. Appropriate capacities of the on-site PV system needed to reach NZCB balances are determined based on the building energy consumption impacted by the simulated climate scenarios. Results from this study demonstrated the emission by electricity consumption increases as moving toward the future scenarios of up to about 25 tons of CO2-eq (i.e., about 14% of the total CO2-eq produced by the electricity energy source) and the PV installation capacity to offset the emission account for the electricity consumption increases significantly up to about 40 kWp (i.e., up to more than 10% of total PV installation capacities) as the different climate scenarios are applied. It is concluded that the cooling energy consumption of office building models would significantly impact GHG emission as future climate scenarios are considered. Consequently, designers of NZCBs should consider high performance cooling energy systems in their designs to reduce the renewable energy generation system capacity to achieve net-zero carbon emission goals.
Highlights
The building sector accounts for approximately 40% of the total end-use energy consumption in the United States [1], including about 21% and 18% for residential and commercial buildings, respectively
Those scenarios are applied in a conventional office building model (i.e., Department of Energy (DOE)’ medium office prototype building model) to estimate energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission as a baseline
This study investigated the impacts of potential future climate changes on annual building energy use intensities and GHG emission in the U.S Northeast and Midwest climate locations
Summary
The building sector accounts for approximately 40% of the total end-use energy consumption (i.e., primary and secondary energy usages) in the United States [1], including about 21% and 18% for residential and commercial buildings, respectively. In the commercial building sector, about 74% of the energy consumption was captured for the electric power sector to generate and supply electricity retails. The U.S Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated that electricity use in the commercial building sector was expected to increase by about 14% by 2050 compared to levels in 2019 [2]. This growth has led to concerns regarding the future increased energy consumption and human emission of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) from the building sector. The amount of electricity power generation had remained flatted after 2010, CO2 emissions continued a general trend of reduction after 2007 mainly because of increased renewable sources and natural gas use as well as reduced coal use in electricity generation, resulting in a 20% reduction of CO2 emissions when compared to the CO2 emissions levels of 2005 [3,4]
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