Heating and cooling energy demand and related emissions of the German residential building stock under climate change

The housing sector is a major consumer of energy. Studies on the future energy demand under climate change which also take into account future changes of the building stock, renovation measures and heating systems are still lacking. We provide the first analysis of the combined effect of these four influencing factors on the future energy demand for room conditioning of residential buildings and resulting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Germany until 2060. We show that the heating energy demand will decrease substantially in the future. This shift will mainly depend on the number of renovated buildings and climate change scenarios and only slightly on demographic changes. The future cooling energy demand will remain low in the future unless the amount of air conditioners strongly increases. As a strong change in the German energy mix is not expected, the future GHG emissions caused by heating will mainly depend on the energy demand for future heating. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.