Long-term predictive energy analysis of a high-performance building in a mediterranean climate under climate change

Zero Energy Buildings (ZEBs) are expected to play a significant role in reducing energy consumption and combating climate change. Despite this awareness, there is a lack of approaches and indicators at the regulatory level to quantify the long-term potential of strategies applied to buildings today. This study concerns the dynamic thermal modeling over the years, until 2080, of a multi-residential building located in Lecce, a city in southeastern Italy, characterized by a Mediterranean hot summer climate. Over time, Italian legislation has brought increasingly stringent limits on the design of the building envelope. Although with different regulatory limits, in the different climates across Italy, a growing trend towards a more insulated envelope, characterized by very low transmittances, has been observed over the years. This study shows how, in hot climates, buildings constructed within the legal limits will suffer from overheating over the years, necessarily leading to a disproportionate, and more extensive, use of cooling systems throughout the year. This study proposes a critical analysis of the long-term effectiveness of national strategies applied to the building envelope to date to achieve the ZEB goal, emphasizing that long-term predictive analyses become relevant in current building design and should be considered in regulations.