Climate change and building energy consumption
Dr Jimeno Fonseca presents "Estimating the Impact of Climate Change on Building Energy Consumption across the United States Under Uncertainty" as part of the CREATE webinar series.
Climate change could have both positive and negative effects on the energy consumption of buildings in the United States. Today, it is not yet clear what the extent of this effect could be at multiple spatial scales, such as buildings, building sectors, cities, and climate zones. More importantly, the associated uncertainty of those effects is not well understood. This knowledge gap makes it difficult to provide reliable projections about what buildings and cities should be prioritized in the race to mitigate climate change.
To address this issue, a hierarchical Bayesian linear model of energy consumption in buildings from close to 100 cities and 14 climate zones across the United States was developed. The model combines new big sources of data, Bayesian statistics, and first-principle models of energy consumption in buildings for the first time. It could be used to forecast the potential impact of climate change in buildings across the United States in the 21st century.
Based on estimates and credible intervals, we conclude that commercial buildings in warm and humid climates should be at the top of the agenda of climate action in the building sector of the United States.
The speaker
Jimeno A. Fonseca is senior researcher and principal investigator at the Singapore-ETH Centre, which he joined in 2016. He obtained a PhD at the ETH Zurich in the modelling, analysis and assessment of energy efficiency strategies in urban communities. There, he created the City Energy Analyst, a leading decision-support tool for the implementation of low-carbon technology in buildings and districts. He graduated with honours in Engineering from the POLIMI and PUJ. Since then, he has participated in several award-winning projects looking at the integration of low-carbon technology in buildings and districts.
Jimeno is member of the chair of Architecture and Buildings Systems of the ETH Zurich, PMI-ACP certified Agile Practitioner, product owner of the City Energy Analyst, visiting professor at the department of computer science of the Universidad Central de Colombia, member of the International Council on Systems Engineering, and principal investigator of the Future Resilient Systems programme and the Cooling Singapore Project at the Singapore-ETH Centre.