Performance assessment of contemporary energy-optimized office buildings under the impact of climate change

Abstract

Climate change can significantly impact the total energy consumption and indoor environment of buildings. This study investigates a potential adaptation and mitigation pathway by implementing a multi-objective optimization strategy to minimize the impact. A baseline building model was carefully established. A sampling-based approach and a multi-objective optimization method were combined to enlarge the vision of this study. Performance of a baseline model, baseline variants, and optimized models under different climate change scenarios and time frames were compared. The results reveal that the present building model will experience a 7.2%–12.3% increase in total energy consumption, along with a significantly longer overheating period in the future. Optimal models show considerable superiority in energy savings and overheating prevention compared to the baseline model and its variants; but under future climate conditions, none of them can help maintain both energy consumption and overheating at the present level of the baseline building. This study recommends that simultaneous evaluation of multiple performance metrics helps make a more accurate and comprehensive assessment of climate change's impact on buildings.