Energy Efficiency in the Urban Scale: Case Study – Prague, Czech Republic

Abstract

Cities are a complex mass of morphological properties of many city fragments, which play a major role in energy consumption. Urban form, urban patterns, or city fragments can also be seen as defined by algorithms or form generators. Cities are designed taking into account infrastructure, city standards and land use regulations. Energy efficiency of the urban form may be understood as the balance between gains and losses of energy, which may depend on a set of parameters mostly defined by the geometrical shape of the buildings and the distance between them. The study starts from the development and analysis of 60 hypothetical models in order to evaluate their energy efficiency potential. The Galapagos Evolutionary Solver is used as a tool in order to find the set of parameters, which brings to the morphological properties the optimal combination of density and surface-to-volume ratio. At the final stage morphological properties of 64 Prague’s patterns were selected. Computer simulation and analysis is performed using the models extracted from the virtual Google Earth model of Prague. During the process of evaluation of the samples, the relationship between the urban form and such parameters as plot coverage, surface-to-volume ratio and the incident solar radiation was established and potentially higher energy efficient structures were indicated. As the result of analysis the interrelation between urban form and energy efficiency was established, which allowed to identify the urban patterns with the higher potential of energy efficiency.