Urban Building Energy Modeling: an hourly energy balance model of residential buildings at a district scale

The energy consumption of buildings is related to several factors, such as the construction and geometric characteristics, occupancy, climate and microclimate conditions, solar exposure, and urban morphology. However, the interaction between buildings and the surrounding urban context should also be taken into consideration in energy consumption models. The aim of this work has been to create a bottom-up model in order to evaluate the energy balance of residential buildings at an urban scale, starting from the hourly energy consumption data. This modeling approach considers the building characteristics together with urban variables to describe the energy balance of the built environment; it can therefore be used to manage heterogeneous types of data at different scales and it can offer accurate spatial-temporal information on the energy performance of buildings. Detailed heat balance methods can be used at a building scale to estimate heating loads, but this urban-scale simplified model can also be used as a decision tool to support urban design explorations and for policy purposes. This urban energy consumption model was verified for a case study of a district in Turin, Italy, with the support of a GIS tool, considering hourly energy consumption data of about 50 residential users for two or three consecutive heating seasons. The results show that a simplified model, based on low quality and quantity data, which are typical of an urban scale, can be a powerful tool for the evaluation and spatial representation of the energy needs of buildings at an urban scale.