Digital Mapping of Spatial Energy Use for Buildings in City

Abstract

Urban energy mapping plays a crucial role in benchmarking the energy performance of buildings for many stakeholders. This study examined a set of buildings in the city of Borlange, Sweden, owned by the municipality. The aim was to present a digital spatial mapping of both electricity use and district heating demand. A toolkit for top-down data processing and analysis was considered based on the energy performance database of municipality-owned buildings. The data were initially cleaned and transformed using the Feature Manipulation Engine tool (FME) and then it was geocoded using a python script with an application program interface (API) for OpenStreetMap. The dataset consists of 221 and 89 geocoded addresses for, respectively, electricity and district heating monthly consumption for the year 2018. The electricity use and heating demand in the building samples were about 24.06 kWh/m2 and 190.99 kWh/m2 respectively, for which great potential for saving heating energy was observed. The digital mapping revealed a spatial representation of identifiable hotspots for electricity uses in high-occupancy/density areas and for district heating needs in districts with buildings mostly constructed before 1980. These results will provide a comprehensive means of understanding the existing energy distributions to stakeholders and energy advisors. They also facilitate strategy geared towards future energy planning in the city, such as energy benchmarking policies.