A simplified urban building energy model to support early-stage energy plans

Abstract

The latest attempts in determining the spatiotemporal patterns of energy use in the building sector have led to the development of a new set of tools referred to as “urban building energy models” (UBEMs). Due to the high level of complexity, the computation cost of UBEMs risks becoming impractically large. As a substitution for complex models, in this study, using a simplified steady-state method for calculating the energy performance of buildings, a more computationally efficient UBEM is proposed. The developed model uses the available information of buildings from open datasets, translates them into simplified physical models, and, finally, estimates the energy performance of buildings for desired spatial and temporal resolutions. A comparison of the simplified UBEM with an advanced UBEM, developed around the building energy simulation software EnergyPlus, proves that the suggested simplified model performs within an acceptable range of accuracy. Furthermore, using the simplified model, the computation cost of the model can improve considerably, from hours to only a few seconds. By validating the results of the simplified UBEM against the measured energy performance of buildings from the Swedish energy performance certificate (EPC) database, it can be also seen that the MAPE does not go higher than 31%.