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Climate change may seriously affect the energy consumption of buildings by influencing their air conditioning loads, especially the ventilation loads which vary directly with the local weather conditions. Research on how the ventilation load responds to climate change is of great significance, especially in coastline subtropical regions like Hong Kong. This paper investigated the impacts of climate change on buildings' ventilation load and building energy use in Hong Kong with the hourly meteorological data from 1950 to 2007. Results have been well validated by the simulation of a typical local hotel building during this period. The results show that climate warming increases both sensible and latent parts of the cooling ventilation load. The latent part, which occupies ∼80% of the total ventilation load, increases at a higher rate, about twice of that of the sensible one. Furthermore, it is found that the urban heat island (UHI) effect causes a much higher growth rate of the ventilation load at night, which is about three times compared with that in the daytime. The latent part of the cooling ventilation load at night, which is found to be the most sensitive component to the climate change, plays a most significant role in the energy consumption increase. The possible measures were thus suggested to avoid negative changes of the ventilation load. Besides, reducing the UHI effect by better urban planning also significantly benefits the local buildings with a long air-conditioning operation time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Hainan province is the only tropical and island province in China, with the unique climatic and geographical features. It has a different energy performance in public buildings from those in the inland areas. This paper investigated the current situation of energy consumption of the sampled public buildings, including 26 hotels, 24 office buildings and 7 department stores, through analyzing utility billing data, on-site survey and measurement, and site operational records. The breakdowns of energy consumption found out that the electricity dominated the energy consumption for all the sampled buildings and the air conditioning system played a key role in the energy consumption of major building services. By analyzing the main factors for building energy consumption, the annual average energy use indexes were calculated to be 141.63kWh/m2, 87.70kWh/m2, and 166.95kWh/m2 for hotels, office buildings and department stores, respectively. Besides, the comparison between Hainan province and other areas revealed that the building energy consumption of this tropical province was at a low level. Because indoor environment quality can influence the health and work efficiency of humans in buildings, field tests on the indoor environment quality were also carried out, and the performance of indoor environment quality was rated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]