Modeling the heating and cooling energy demand of urban buildings at city scale

Abstract

Many computational approaches exist to estimate heating and cooling energy demand of buildings at city scale, but few existing models can explicitly consider every buildings of an urban area, and even less can address hourly -or less- energy demand. However, both aspects are critical for urban energy supply designers. Therefore, this paper gives an overview of city energy simulation models from the point of view of short energy dynamics, and reviews the related modeling techniques, which generally involve detailed approaches. Analysis highlights computational costs of such simulations as key issue to overcome towards reliable microsimulation of the power demand of urban areas. Relevant physical and mathematical simplifications as well as efficient numerical and computational techniques based on uncertainties analysis and error quantification should thus be implemented.