Impact of climate change on electricity consumption of air conditioners in residential buildings in Beijing

Air conditioning electricity consumption accounts for 20% of the total electricity consumption in urban residential buildings in China. It is of great significance to analyse the impact of climate change on air conditioning electricity consumption to the research and application of energy-saving and low-carbon technologies in residential buildings. Climate change not only affects the building cooling and heating load demand, but also affects the air conditioning operation electricity consumption through the influence on the split air conditioning operation energy efficiency ratio (EER), which eventually causes great changes in the split air conditioning electricity consumption of residential buildings. Under the presence of global warming and an increase in extreme weather events, this study uses the energy simulation software DeST to quantitatively simulate the change in cooling load of a typical residential building in Beijing from 1960 to 2014, and uses the split air conditioning model of TRNSYS to calculate the annual air conditioning electricity consumption of the building. The analysis shows a decreasing trend of air conditioning electricity consumption during the period of 1960 to 1980, and a significant increase in average temperature since 1980, with a consequent increase in air conditioning electricity consumption. By analysing the influence of meteorological parameters on air conditioning electricity consumption, this study finds that the outdoor dry bulb temperature has the strongest influence on air conditioning electricity consumption, while humidity content and solar radiation has less correlation with electricity consumption. In addition, this study considers the influence of outdoor temperature on the EER of air conditioner operation, and calculates the value of air conditioner electricity consumption, and finds that there is a big difference compared with the electricity consumption calculated using the rated EER of air conditioners, and the deviation of the cumulative value and the sharp peak value calculated by the two methods is about 10%. Hence, the impact of outdoor temperature on the operation of split air conditioners should be considered when analysing the impact of climate change on building energy consumption to make the analysis results more accurate and reasonable.