City-wide Building Energy Efficiency Assessment Using EPC Data

Yue Wu,Abubakr Bahaj,Luke Blunden

doi:10.5334/fce.10

Abstract

The Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) requirements in Europe have provided rich data of energy efficiency status of individual buildings at scale, allowing appropriate assessments to be carried out without the need of conducting additional surveys. By 2012, the EPC data in England and Wales in the UK has reached a coverage of up to 45% of the entire building stock (DECC 2014), and the number of new certificates added every year is over 1 million. The work presented here seeks to understand the potential of using such dataset to deliver systematic analysis of energy efficiency of buildings at a city scale. This study utilises all EPC datasets available for the city of Southampton, UK, and developed an automatic geographic-referencing methodology so the EPC data can be integrated onto geographic information systems (GIS). Such methodology allows large quantity of EPC data to be analysed spatially, facilitating the assessment of energy performance of different regions in a city. The results show clearly areas in the city that have the lowest or highest level of performance in terms of buildings’ energy efficiency, and revealed the impact of certain building intervention measures (such insulation, double glazing) on the energy consumption within the considered buildings. The analyses show that factors such as the existence of high streets and new building developments have significant influence on the energy efficiency in the city where these are present. The geographic-referencing methodology developed in this study has the potential to be utilised in a wide range of subjects, bridging the current gap of data availability, allowing building related datasets to be incorporated with GIS analysis.

Highlights

The UK Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) scheme was established in 2007 as a response to the European Union Directive 2002/91/EC (Council of the European Union 2002), which aims to promote improvements on building energy efficiency and requires member states to develop their own scheme of evaluating and labelling the energy performance of buildings (UK Government 2007; Department for Communities and Local Government 2014b)
Their argument is supported by the work of Fabbri et al (2012), in which city-wide EPC database was integrated with tools from the geographic information systems (GIS) for the analysis of energy performance of a city in Italy
The georeferencing results estimated by the model on the 200 samples are manually validated by comparing the property’s EPC address with its actual address, and the results are discussed

Summary

Introduction

During the 12 month period ending June 2015, over 2 million EPCs were lodged into the database (Department for Communities and Local Government 2015) and all existing datasets can be requested to review by the public Such database provides in-depth knowledge about the energy usage efficiency within individual buildings, and the high coverage of such data enables high-resolution building energy studies to be conducted at a city scale. Using the widely-acknowledged classification method by Swan & Ugursal (2009) in which energy modelling approaches are separated into two different categories – top down and bottom up, Johansson et al (2016) pointed out that EPC data have the potential of supporting both bottom-up and top-down approaches Their argument is supported by the work of Fabbri et al (2012), in which city-wide EPC database was integrated with tools from the geographic information systems (GIS) for the analysis of energy performance of a city in Italy.

Methods

Results

Conclusion