Vulnerability to climate change impacts of present renewable energy systems designed for achieving net-zero energy buildings

There are high hopes and expectations in the potential of Net-Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB) to contribute to combat the adverse environmental effects from intensive human activity, including energy use. An important related question that has received insufficient attention and is therefore addressed in this study, is how NZEB equipped with renewable energy (RE) systems would perform in future climates that will be caused by the ongoing environmental impacts. In this research, downscaled future hourly weather data from the Global Climate Models (GCM) are used to predict future performance of RE systems for low energy using residential buildings in 10 different climate zones in the U.S. Renewable energy systems with different configurations of Photovoltaic (PV) solar energy and wind system power generation are modeled and coupled with hourly building energy loads. The research results show that buildings with the present configurations of RE will be losing their capability to meet the zero-energy goal in half of the considered climate zones. It was found that the RE systems for a future NZEB should be resized and reconfigured to accommodate climate change impacts. RE systems prioritizing PV systems shows good stability and performance in power generation under expected future climate conditions. A criterion was developed to assist a proposed grid search method for finding the RE system configurations for future NZEB that would identify vulnerabilities of present NZEB's performance under climate change. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.