Energy Poverty and Heatwaves. Experimental Investigation on Low-Income Households’ Energy Behavior

Global and local climate change increases the occurrence of extreme weather events such as heatwaves (HW), which in the next years will increase even more in both frequency and magnitude. This phenomenon strongly affects people’s quality of life due to societal, health, and environmental repercussions, but also 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 they may not own a proper air conditioning system, or not be able to sustain the energy costs for Air Conditioning (AC) use. Several works in the literature try to investigate the impact of HW 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, rare events such as HW. Moreover, none of them consider the impact of HW in an energy poverty scenario. This work presents the results of a wide experimental campaign aimed at evaluating the impact of HW on energy consumption in an energy poverty scenario. The thermal response of two Italian social housing buildings was monitored. The results indicate that, during an HW, an exponential increase in consumption for cooling is observed, which is 4 to 8 times greater than that encountered in normal summer periods. This result highlights the importance of considering a real use scenario in evaluating the impact of HW on building energy consumption.