Design of Buildings Under Global Warming Using Climate Scenarios Design of Buildings Under Global Warming Using Climate Scenarios

Designing buildings that will exist and be inhabited for at least 50 – 100 years in the face of climate change is an exciting and non-trivial challenge. Currently, when designing the “Energy Efficiency” part, it is usual to use climatic data (solar and temperature), obtained from measurements in a limited number of meteorological stations on the territory of Bulgaria in the past 30-year climatic periods. This makes the newly designed buildings suitable for the past and not the future with the expected significant change in temperatures, air humidity, and other climatic parameters. Considering different possible trajectories of human behavior that lead to different climate consequences, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC defined four climate scenarios under which corresponding global and regional climate models were created. They can be used to investigate the behavior of newly designed buildings in the warmer climate of the late 21st century. This methodology was applied to the study of a newly designed building in Bulgaria. The heating energy in the period 2061 – 2080 with climate scenario RCP 4,5 (90 %) will decrease by about 32 %. The cooling energy demand will increase by about 150 % and the dry cooling load – by about 170 % due to the substantial increase in summer outdoor temperatures. Adding active blinds to the design reduces the increase in dry cooling load to 93 %.