Quantifying the effects of climate change and risk level on peak load design in buildings

Good building design aims to balance providing a comfortable internal environment for as much of the time as possible within a variety of constraints. An important factor is the expected weather, but in a changing climate this poses additional challenges to engineers and architects. This paper examines the effects of increased external temperature on the size of the central air conditioning and heating plant for an example building. It is found that for each 1°C rise in external temperatures, the peak cooling load increases approximately by 10%, the chiller power by 14% and fan power for distribution by 30-50%. These are relatively large increases in power needed to counteract rising external temperature and the paper considers the choice of risk level for sizing building plant. From HadRM3 data, the future frequency distribution of higher external temperatures is examined to evaluate the effects on plant size of designing to a fixed percentile of risk. Projected changes in absolute humidity are also discussed.

Practical applications: Climate change is an important topic for building services engineers, resulting in the UK in the new, performance-based Building Regulations Part L. New, future weather data will also become available with different climate change scenarios. This paper examines the implications of both climate change and the risk level on the peak load for natural ventilation or air conditioning and heating that is used in the design of systems.