Future heating and cooling degree days for Belgium under a high-end climate change scenario

The local outdoor climate and building characteristics influence the energy use of a building to an important extent. To design energy efficient and climate robust buildings, it is important to get insights into the energy demand over the building's service life from the early design phase onwards. This paper presents an overview of the different variants of the heating and cooling degree day method. A convection-permitting climate model is furthermore used to obtain heating and cooling degree days (for a baseline temperature of 18 °C) for the RCP 8.5 (high-end) climate change scenario for Belgium on a high-resolution grid of 2.8 km. Area of focus for this paper is Belgium. The results demonstrate a decrease of the HDD with 27% between 1976-2004 (3189 HDD) and 2070-2098 (2337 HDD). In contrast, the CDD were found to increase with a factor 2.4 from 167 CDD to 401 CDD in the same timeline. Smaller reductions in average HDD were moreover found in urban areas compared to rural areas. For the CDD, a higher absolute increase was found for urban areas and the Northeast of Belgium.