Comparing building performance of supermarkets under future climate change: UK case study

Focus on climate change and extreme weather conditions has received considerable attention in recent years. Civil engineers are now focusing on designing buildings that are more eco-friendly in the face of climate change. This paper describes the research conducted to assess the impact of future climate change on energy usage and carbon emissions in a typical supermarket at multiple locations across the UK. Locations that were included in the study were London, Manchester, and Southampton. These three cities were compared against their building performance based on their respective climatic conditions. Based on the UK Climatic Projections (UKCP09), a series of energy modelling simulations which were provided by the Chartered Institute of Building Service Engineers (CIBSE) were conducted on future weather years for this investigation. This investigation ascertains and quantifies the annual energy consumption, carbon emissions, cooling, and heating demand of the selected supermarkets at the three locations under various climatic projections and emission scenarios, which further validates annual temperature rise as a result of climatic variation. The data showed a trend of increasing variations across the UK as one moves southwards, with London and Southampton at the higher side of the spectrum followed by Manchester which has the least variability amongst these three cities. This is the first study which investigates impact of the climate change on the UK supermarkets across different regions by using the real case scenarios.