Calibration method for an open source model to simulate building energy at territorial scale

Abstract

In a context of massive renovation of residential housing, stakeholders need decision-support tools based on knowledge of the current building stock and an accurate simulation of energy demand. For this purpose, we developed a val- idation/calibration method on a territorial/national scale in order to represent the real consumption of housing. This methodological approach provides (1) more reliable identification of energy-saving measures (changes in technology or behaviour) and (2) improved knowledge of the energy simulation tool and its post-calibration performance for optimisation issues. The main contribution of the calibration method described in this paper is the geographical scale concerned: all French residential housing has been modelled, simulated and calibrated with national data (geometries and attributes) on buildings. Furthermore, some occupants' socio-professional characteristics have been taken into account to reflect their actual energy behaviours. This is different from traditional approaches that focus only on a few buildings or archetypes. This paper also describes the application of this methodology on an Open Source simulation software in order to be easily verifiable and usable. This linear model will also be used to optimise renovation solutions at territorial scale in future work. All data used in this paper are Open Data and thus available to the scientific community. This method enabled more than 18 million buildings to be calibrated while reducing the Normalized Root Mean Square Error, between simulated and real energy annual consumption, from 52% to 24% for gas and from 24% to 15% for electricity. In addition, the user of the method is free to prioritise either the maximum error reduction or the number of calibration coefficients if a simpler model is desired. This paper also discusses the results obtained from this method for future improvement.