Revisiting cooling energy requirements of residential buildings in Portugal in light of climate change

• Autor(a) principal: Panão, Marta Oliveira
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.9/2366
• topic: Cooling Energy; Building thermal code; Climate change; Benchmark

Since climate data for building energy simulation have recently been refreshed with 1971–2000 observational data and theoretically influenced by a conservative approach of climate change, benchmarks forcooling energy requirements for residential buildings are discussed for a set of 30 regions in Portugal,mainland and islands, as a contribution to the next revision of Portuguese building thermal code (DL118/2013). The main conclusion is that gain utilization factor correlates with average external air tem-perature for summer season by a logarithmic function. The benchmark for gain utilization factor playsan important role in defining cooling energy requirements. A set of recommendations are suggested:(i) using the gain utilization factor as an index to evaluate the overheating risk, thus, for values abovea defined threshold cooling energy needs could be neglected for primary energy demand quantifica-tion; this measure may encourage designers to integrate passive cooling systems; (ii) defining a nationalroadmap based on technological advances of shading solutions for benchmark parameterization of thewest equivalent collecting area by unit of floor area starting from 0.065.