Ondate di calore e povertà energetica: indagine sperimentale sulla risposta termica di edifici di edilizia sociale e sul comportamento energetico di famiglie a basso reddito

HEATWAVES AND ENERGY POVERTY: AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION ON THE THERMAL RESPONSE OF SOCIAL HOUSING AND LOW-INCOME HOUSEHOLDS’ ENERGY BEHAVIOR. Global and local climate change increases the occurrence of extreme weather events such as heat waves (HWs), which will increase even more in both frequency and magnitude in the next years. This phenomenon strongly affects both people’s quality of life, due to societal, health, and environmental repercussions, and the building sector, increasing energy use and deteriorating the indoor thermal environment. Low-income households are the most affected by health issues during HWs, since these people may not own a proper air conditioning (AC) system, or not be able to sustain the energy costs for AC activation. Several works in the literature try to investigate the impact of HWs on building thermal response and energy consumption. However, these works are mainly focused on numerical simulations and do not consider the possible different AC use behavior that may occur in extreme and infrequent events such as HW. Moreover, none of them consider the impact of HWs in an energy poverty scenario. For this reason, this work presents the results of a wide experimental campaign aimed at evaluating the impact of HWs on energy consumption in an energy poverty scenario. The thermal response of two high-mass buildings social housing buildings, placed in the city of Reggio Emilia, was monitored, considering both unoccupied and occupied indoor environments. The results indicate a reluctance of the occupants to use air conditioners due to economic constraints even in case of high indoor discomfort conditions. However, during an HW, an increase in energy consumption for cooling is observed, which is 4 to 8 times greater than that encountered in normal summer periods. This result differs from the numerical results obtained in the literature, where a maximum increase of about 90% is observed, highlighting the importance of considering a real use scenario in evaluating the impact of HW on building energy consumption.