Marianne M. Armstrong

Buildings and homes in Canada will be exposed to unprecedented climatic conditions in the future as a consequence of global climate change. To improve the climate resiliency of existing and new buildings, it is important to evaluate their performance over current and projected future climates. Hygrothermal and whole building simulation models, which are important tools for assessing performance, require continuous climate records at high temporal frequencies of a wide range of climate variables for input into the kinds of models that relate to solar radiation, cloud-cover, wind, humidity, rainfall, temperature, and snow-cover. In this study, climate data that can be used to assess the performance of building envelopes under current and projected future climates, concurrent with 2 °C and 3.5 °C increases in global temperatures, are generated for 11 major Canadian cities. The datasets capture the internal variability of the climate as they are comprised of 15 realizations of the future climate generated by dynamically downscaling future projections from the CanESM2 global climate model and thereafter bias-corrected with reference to observations. An assessment of the bias-corrected projections suggests, as a consequence of global warming, future increases in the temperatures and precipitation, and decreases in the snow-cover and wind-speed for all cities.

As one objective of the International Energy Agency's Energy Conservation in Buildings and Community Systems Programme Annex 42, detailed Canadian household electrical demand profiles were created using a bottom-up approach from available inputs, including a detailed appliance set, annual consumption targets and occupancy patterns. These profiles were created for use in the simulation of residential cogeneration devices to examine the issues of system performance, efficiency and emission reduction potential. This article describes the steps taken to generate these 5-min electrical consumption profiles for three target single-family detached households – low, medium and high consumers, a comparison of the generated output with measured data from Hydro Québec, and a demonstration of the use of the new profiles in building performance simulations of residential cogeneration devices.