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According to researchers, climate change is inevitable in the 21st century. As far as Greece is concerned, this climate change will be related to an increase in ambient surface temperature and to a decrease in annual precipitation. On the other hand wind patterns will not change significantly. Also, no significant changes are expected for global solar radiation. Regional climate models related to Greece show low uncertainties. The climate of Greece is typical Mediterranean with wet, cool winters and hot, dry summers. The temperature range is, on average, between 5 °C and 35 °C without extreme weather events. The cool sea breeze on the islands makes summer conditions milder.
In this research a typical single family two storey detached residential building for five occupants, in the hottest area of Greece – Rhodos island, is thermally optimized by using various strategies including the use of natural night ventilation to flush heat from the building. The cooling and heating demands of the building are optimized to a total of less than 15 kWh/m²/yr. TAS dynamic thermal simulation software was used to assess thermal performance. These thermal simulations incorporated the most updated weather data from Meteonorm software for the area. The thermal demands of the same building, with the use of future data, from the same source, for different emission scenarios until 2050 were calculated and compared. Finally, new night ventilation options are checked for optimization purposes covering the examined period.