Predicting climate effects on building energy efficiency

With ongoing climate change, the world is expected to continue to grow warmer throughout the rest of this century. This will bring changes in weather that could stress existing infrastructure and exacerbate energy crises.

Wang et al. downscaled climate predictions to explore their effects on weather patterns in Hong Kong and used this data to examine future energy consumption of residential buildings.

“Global climate models give us a broad idea but tend to overlook the finer local details that are important for planning,” said author Jiayao Wang. “To bridge this gap, we downscaled these models to provide a clearer, more localized view of future weather patterns.”

Using this approach, along with several common building plans used in Hong Kong, the authors evaluated the expected increase in these buildings’ energy consumption. They found that these buildings would see an energy use increase of between 12 and 14% by the end of the century under the most aggressive climate change scenarios.

For the researchers, their results demonstrate the need to develop and implement new building design strategies and improvements to safeguard against rising energy costs as the world continues to warm. They hope to expand this work to a global scope for larger scale climate change preparation.

“One of our main objectives is to extend the model’s capabilities to other regions beyond Hong Kong, testing its applicability and accuracy in different climatic zones and urban layouts,” said author Sunwei Li. “This would help validate the model’s utility on a global scale and provide insights applicable to a broader range of cities facing similar challenges.”

Source: “Framework for generating high-resolution Hong Kong local climate projections to support building energy simulations,” by Jiayao Wang, Binura J Kudagama, Udara S. Perera, Sunwei Li, and Xuelin Zhang, Physics of Fluids (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0254669 .