Evaluation of Impact of Change in Climatic Conditions on Net-Zero Energy Designs for Residential Buildings

This study examines the impact of updated weather datasets on the selection of energy-efficient measures (EEMs) and photovoltaic (PV) sizing to reach net-zero energy (NZE) performance for residential buildings in four USA cities with different climates: Minneapolis, MN, Chicago, IL, San Francisco, CA, and Phoenix, AZ. The analysis results show that annual heating and cooling degree days from various climatic datasets can differ from those estimated using 2025 data by 0.5–23.3%. These differences in climatic datasets can result in substantial deviations in predicting annual energy needs for residential buildings. For buildings in heating-dominated climates, such as Minneapolis, MN, significant reductions in annual energy demands of up to 8.2% are incurred when using the most recent climate dataset, while increases of up to 5.0% are found for the cooling-dominated climate of Phoenix, AZ. Moreover, variations in climatic datasets affect design specifications and economic indicators of residential buildings. Life-cycle costs of baseline designs are lowered by 3.6% for buildings in Minneapolis, MN, but are increased by 2.3% for buildings in Phoenix, AZ. Similarly, capacities for rooftop PV systems required for net-zero energy designs decrease by 9.5% for buildings in Minneapolis and increase by 11.7% for buildings in Phoenix, AZ.