Mitigation Methods of Climate Change Impact on the Cooling Load of Public Residential Buildings in Singapore

Abstract

Buildings have time-varying interactions with the local climate condition for the heating or cooling systems; changes of the surrounding climate condition affect building energy consumption. Based on the thermal envelope approach, which considers the heat gain by conduction and radiation through the wall and fenestration, the cooling load simulation study was conducted to see the impact of climate change on the cooling load of public residential buildings in Singapore and propose mitigation methods to bring the predicted increase of the cooling load in the future back to the current level. From the simulation results, climate change is predicted to increase the cooling load of current public residential models for 11.8–55.8% through three different time frames. Based on the parametric study of mitigation methods proposed, changing the material of the wall, material of the glass, and the surface properties show a smaller increase in the predicted cooling load compared with other methods because of the low window to wall ratio. A combination of three methods shows that the increase of the predicted cooling load in Period 3 can be brought back to the current level.