Buildings: Heating and Cooling

While energy savings in buildings is among the key prerequisites for a low-carbon future, our ability to maintain temperatures in buildings within a specific comfort range, and thus our demand for heating and cooling energy, are also highly sensitive to climate change. We quantify two main impact chains: (1) a higher temperature in winter leads to a reduction of heating energy demand and (2) a higher temperature in summer leads to an increase in demand for cooling. The demand for cooling energy depends largely on the future uptake of air conditioning in the building sector and is subject to considerable uncertainty. On quantifying these two impacts for the example of Austria for the period around 2050 a net saving of about 230 million euros per year is found, triggering slightly positive effects on welfare and GDP. The result is depending on the development of energy prices and in particular by the ratio of electricity to fuel price in the heating sector.The results show that, in absolute terms, the energy reduction in heating is much higher than the increased energy demand for cooling for the time horizon and the geographical location investigated.This stems from the fact that energy demand for air conditioning in Austria in 2008 was only 0.4-0.5 % of the final energy demand for heating. The impacts and costs resulting from a strong increase in electricity peak loads in summer are investigated in Chap. 14 (Electricity).