Linking urban scenarios with energy simulations for dense urban planning under climate change

Abstract

This research aims at linking Urban Planning, Energy Simulations and Climate Change projections into the year 2100 for hot climates. The workflow of going back and forth between urban and city scale plans and individual neighborhood parcels to building scale, for the sake of simulating energy demand for a given city into the future is complex. It is prone to rely on many assumptions and simplifications in order to aid the simulations. In this work, we streamline the process with new computational tools, with the goal of communicating a more precise impact of building scale and neighborhood morphological scale design and retrofit strategies in order to meet energy reduction and carbon emission targets focusing on 2030, 2050 and 2100. Urban scenarios are developed using Envision Tomorrow. The building archetypes used therein are associated with energy demand profiles which we simulate using EnergyPlus for various climate change scenarios to improve the forecasting ability of Envision Tomorrow. Denser developments yield far lower neighborhood energy use.