Modelling the effect of passive cooling measures on future energy needs for the Austrian building stock

Abstract

Driven by climate change, many studies project strong increases in space cooling demand in the coming decades. Passive cooling techniques showed promising results in regional-level models to counteract such increases but have hardly been investigated on a country-level. Therefore, we modelled the potential impact of selected representative concentration pathways (RCP) as well as passive cooling measures (shading, night ventilation) and sufficiency measures (higher indoor temperature) on the space cooling demand of the Austrian building stock. Assuming 100% technology saturation, cooling demand increased from 12 TWh to 19 TWh between 2017 and 2050 under RCP4.5 and 28 TWh under RCP8.5, with residential buildings accounting for the majority of this increase. Up to 60% of the energy demand increase was attributable to climate change. Ambitious implementation of the investigated measures reduced space cooling demand in 2050 by 68% to 73% and completely counteracted the increase in cooling demand. Shading proved particularly effective, reducing space cooling demand by roughly 11 TWh in 2050, followed by sufficiency measures (5 TWh) and night cooling (2.5 TWh). This shows that results from regional-level studies on the effectiveness of shading and night cooling for mitigating space cooling demand also upscale to a country-level in a temperate climate.