Simplification and adjustment of the energy consumption indices of office building envelopes in response to climate change

Abstract

Changes in the climate system affect a building’s energy consumption. Many countries have implemented building energy consumption indices to regulate the newly built buildings from excessive energy use. However, those indices were developed based on previous climate datasets and were incapable of responding to the changing climate. To stabilize the energy uses of future buildings as those under today’s climate, regular updates of the evaluation index are mandatory to take climatic variations into consideration. This study firstly discussed the limitations in responding to future climate of current practicing building envelope energy conservation index in Taiwan. Secondly, we proposed a new index, the overall thermal transfer value (OTTV), based on the simulation results and tried to convert existing baseline criteria for the new OTTV. An approach on how to alter the OTTV index in response to the climate change was proposed. We found that because of the warming climate, the coefficient of the OTTV equation has to be changed over times to accurately respond to the changing climate. The approach presented in this paper provides a method on how to formulate a climate responsive index in pursuit of a better energy efficient building in the future.