Forecasting long-term electricity demand for cooling of Singapore's buildings incorporating an innovative air-conditioning technology

In an effort to accurately plan for investment on energy production and distribution, this paper proposes a long-term electricity consumption forecasting model for buildings' cooling by employing a high energy conservative scenario. The key aspect of the high energy conservative scenario is to adopt an innovative adsorbent-based dehumidifier and an indirect evaporative cooling (AD-IEC) technology as opposed to conventional mechanical vapor compression system. Bottom-up equations were developed to identify the cooling load and electricity consumption of both residential and non-residential buildings for the period 2002-2013. Based on the time-series electricity consumption, a multiple linear regression model is developed to forecast electricity demand for the future period of 2014-2030. It is found that the electricity demands for cooling in the building sectors account for 31 ± 2% of the total electricity consumption in Singapore, This study concluded that the high conservative scenario realizes the best potential of electricity saving of 21,096 GWh until 2030. Using a CO₂ emission factor of 4.49 × 10^-4 metric tons CO₂/kWh, the total carbon footprint saving from all power plants is estimated to be 9491,264 t of CO₂. This work evolves a new forecasting methodology to predict buildings' cooling energy consumption involving the use of novel cooling technologies.